Strange Graves

photo by Squared

She calls me after work, carrying an orange juice box full of flowers and she says, let's go to the cemetery.

I'm reluctant. I'm slightly hungover, at the very least tired, not amused by anything. I'm overcast, like the sky.

Trudging through puddles, accumulations of soggy pine needles and dead leaves, fall feels omnipresent. Inescapable drudgery.

We place brilliantly-dyed flowers, the stems hacked off, onto any graves that look lonely. Neon green, canary yellow, periwinkle and opal white. Fake colors.

I'm ignoring any new or military graves, looking for the markers placed in Citizen's Cemetery that are for normal people, people so long dead they never knew what electricity was or chemical warfare or strip malls or nuclear holocaust or ATM's or any of this. Doesn't their pain, centuries old, long buried, seem more justified than this? Even if it's forgotten?

I yearned for causes of death, some kind of excuse, but there were none. My thoughts couldn't connect.

I searched for the graves of children, babies with the same birth and death date. I found pairs, two brothers who died before they were my age. Those tombstones for married couples, the one side already etched deep with dates, the other, empty . . . patiently waiting. Over one such couple's grave, I kissed her, long and hard.

She was crying. It was hard, raw. It could be us soon. But maybe that's just selfish thinking.

And there's a picture of our feet, the box, the tomb.

We gave the remainder of the flowers to a man bringing his kids to the cemetery.