The smell of salt and sea grass so unfamiliar in this brooding setting.
The road turns and what once in retrospect to the backtracking eye, an effulgent pathway returning to civilization, is now a boomerang shape leading into a group of thickly canopied trees.
Almost before I can ascertain it's presence through the night-thick fog, there, a yard in front of me... My destination. A half eroded rot-iron fence with a worn out brass plaque.
The neighbor had said "There's an old cemetery up there, about 40 miles from here. Some amazing statuary." My car and my feet had done the rest.
"Safest place in town" Come my fathers words from the bastion of my memory palace as I look past the gate to the obelisks of the departed.
And there too, although another place and time, are memories of safety. Running from bullies and hiding with Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, foster parents who past on a hundred years before I was born. My escape from violence into a house of brick and dust.
Pushing past the gate, as always comes the crescendo of my own mortality, pressing from within and smothering from without. The sadness and the futility of trying anything, ever. When all we amount to is this... And I feel the anger of unfinished business...
Then comes the fear... Every zombie movie I've ever seen playing out behind my eyes and I'm the star.
I fight the urge to hitch and run as my legs want to give out from underneath me. A moments resignation to the thought that I was a fantastical idiot to come here alone.
And then... it passes... and the graves are simply graves. No monsters here.
Oh there are ghosts to be sure. But the violent dead don't haunt themselves, they are too afraid. Those who haunt cemeteries are simply lost, or waiting for loved ones, or coming to terms with the absence of physicality represented by our final words, etched in stone before they, like most before them catch the a-train to Avalon or heaven, or "The other side" to those still unaffiliated.
I can't see the markings in the dark. The grass is overgrown. Some of the stones teeter to the left or the right. It's crowded here. Evidence of the smallpox and influenza that conquered the area in the days before health insurance.
I sit down on a broken stone bench opposite a weeping angel, pressing down the three foot grass at my feet. How completely wrapped up in grief these catholics are. "you don't celebrate your faith, you mourn it."
Still it is beautiful. One arm splayed across a stone table, the other supporting it's saddened visage. Wings enfolding. It's beautiful, I can't deny that... Or the fact that I'm a hypocrite.
For a time I am overwhelmed by a sense of total peace. Rocked back and forth in a silent symphony of untold stories. Brushing by me as tangible as the wind. Nothing dies... the volume simply fades below the range of physical hearing.
And then I really look at her...
"No more tears..." And in the silence afterword I can't tell if I spoke the words to the angel or to myself. I can't remember if I said them or she did.
"I know... I know..." We whisper.
And I want to hold her... This frozen emotion, cast in stone... for what? How unbelievable egocentric... "And the angels weeped for him."
They carved her from stone in permanent pain... never once considering her. All things with a spirit entwined... Never considering the eternity of stone.
"I know you. This emotion, I know you. This won't do"
So I drive 40 miles to try frantically... futilely to wipe stone tears from lifeless statuary with my thumb. My hand cupping her cheek and jaw in the manor of a caress, a prelude to a kiss.
And I wonder... how much it would cost... how many witch doctors to employ, to transfer her essence to another monument... I would give it hopeful eyes, and a benevolent smile, and beautiful robes and sashes that would appear dry in the coldest rain, Wings that spread unbelievably far, and a sword, held high above, to keep her safe from her demons, her graveyard memories.
"I'll visit you..." and the ambiguity of our conversation is at once comforting and unsettling.
I need to buy roses.