Both feet on the floor and the reality of my day starts.

I didn’t think it was going to be one of those days.  I woke-up with so much energy, but then remember that you are not here.  Where the **** are you?  It has been like what, three months?   You have been gone for that long.  Three ******, long months.  

My legs are like molasses.  I take steps towards the bathroom, which seem to take me forever.  Finally I arrive, to bask in the bliss of my first morning ****.   I make my way to the kitchen, putting the kettle on, before turning-on my phone.  Yes!  I have messages from you.  But, it’s the same old, same old - you’re having a good time, meeting loads of people, seeing loads of things, blah, blah.  The standard *******.  But you still haven’t answered my question, “when are you coming back?  I miss you - things are lonely here without you **”.  I’ve asked it, over and over, with each message you send.  And each time, I get no response.

Today is Tuesday, Shrink-Tuesday.

I hate the guy.  Not the guy himself, I mustn’t over exaggerate.  What I really hate, is the idea of seeing a shrink.  I’m sure he’d be cool to go out and have a drink with, but as a shrink he *****.  All shrinks ****. I don’t even want to be here.  I already know what’s wrong with me.  This is the first time we’ve been apart in 15+ years and I’m feeling it, you know.   I’m really feeling it.  I miss you.  I tell the shrink that I’ve received messages from you.  I get that same flat look he always gives me.  Interested, but not so interested.  And each time, he asks me what you said, how I felt about it and what I replied.  But this time, I’ve brought the phone.  That excites him a little.  I can see it in his face.  He goes through the messages, and hands it back to me.  ‘So how does her response make you feel?’  I want to punch him right, bang in his gob.  The session’s over.  I ask when he thinks he’ll sign me off to get back to work.  I just need to something to do.  Something to occupy my time.  ‘We’ll see.  Let’s talk about it next week.’

Tuesday turns into Wednesday; Wednesday into Thursday, and days, into days, into days. My daily routine continues.  Wake, ****, coffee, check messages, remain idle.  Saturday rolls around.  Still no news from you.  I have the gruesome twosome over for a visit - your mother and my mother.  All they do is fuss, fuss, fuss.  I’m not sure why they don’t think that I can’t manage the house on my own?  I know you’ll be laughing at that when you read it. No really, they’re alright.  I must admit, I’ve had a rough couple of days, and I'm glad to have their company.  And, for the first time, I’m looking forward to Shrink-Tuesday.  I realise that I’m not coping.  I just need you back.  We go for a ride.  They both insist.  We stop-off for a quick bite to eat at Bernies Café (you love that place). With lunch finished, your mother wants to visit your father’s grave.  You know how much I hate cemeteries.

En route to the cemetery, and within twenty minutes we arrive.  I want to stay in the car, but those two wont’ have it.   ‘You came for fresh air.’  Fresh air yes; to walk among the dead, no - how creepy.  They mean well, so I acquiesce.  We arrive at your father’s grave.   Mum and I, our arms intertwined, watch as your mother, after sitting down on her portable chair, places fresh flowers on his grave.  Your mother is talking him, I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I can still tell that she misses him.  Your mother’s done.  I am more than ready to leave.  As I turn to go, mum pulls me back, ‘Go on David, it would be such a waste if you didn’t say hello.’  I can hear your mum’s voice behind me ‘Hello Janine, we’ve come for a little visit.  And look who I have with me?  David.  David’s come to visit you’.  I hear your name, and I become paralysed.  I want to run but I am unable to move. Mum is now standing in front of me, and like a mother with her child, she takes me in her arms, and slowly turns me around.  My eyes are closed.  I don't want to see.  But I know they can't stay closed forever.  I open my eyes, and it’s there.  I can see it - the tombstone.  Mum’s holding onto me, and all I can hear is my silence. Silence and my tears.  There’s so much I want to say.  But I can’t.  It hurts so much, that I can’t speak.  And what could I say that I’ve not said in the past 3 months?  I miss you.  Things are so lonely here without you.  And I just want to know, when you’re coming back.

Here is what I want to tell people about the ghastly
the grim the macabre the morbid
the grinning skulls we draw on pages
at desks far from fields of skulls set rigid:

You cannot negotiate with silence.
You can only
look at it

however
you like.

There is no sanctity dead or living.
Though, for all of us, I would wish it so
(we never cease in making monuments to swear it is so)
(look at these monuments--
and see it is not).

A natural law requires no belief.

You don’t listen.
I said:
Let go.

When walking through a gravesite, you forget that several feet under lies the body of a person you may or may not know.

I have a surname and plot number...

This could have been my family.

Maybe it is.
Maybe it was.

I don't feel worthy enough to sit in the grass before the tombstones.

To place my hands on the stones... they're so cold.

I've read the inscriptions.

Never forgotten by wife and son.
Faithful unto death, may he rest in peace.
A soldier of the great war.
Known unto God

Known unto God

Known unto God.

I have a surname and a plot number written in roman numerals, somebody tell me where I can find the plot under the number 30.

I ran through the gravesite only to find 29.

And I ran out of time.

So tell me where I can find him.

After all... an unknown family wrapped in a common surname is all I really know.

I met a man who claimed him and I came from the same home,
I told him I've never been.

he didn't understand my disconnected nostalgia,
Instead he trusted place and time.
I guess he hasn't had much experience with drafty windows or closed mouths.

I tried to explain to him, home is where you hide your skeletons,
and I've used people and words as closet doors,
when that didn't work I buried them in shallow graves under my skin.

he said he noticed the bones sticking out of my body and I told him,
my search for home as left me starving and unstable,

that after a lifetime of asking for directions
to churches and cemeteries,
I've become envious of comfortable beds and worn-in floor boards.

9.29.16 ©
I sit in cemeteries to center myself.
Filling my lungs with oxygen
While my friends lay under the earth.

What was the world like the last day they knew it?
Before it became their final resting place?
Is there anyone left to remember them?

I sit and lie and fantasize about
The incredible lives they must have lived.
Reality is most were no more than ordinary.

But to me, they bring comfort.
In an odd sort of way complex in its existence
What do they have to fear? Their lives are done.

But mine is not; not yet.
I have blood in my veins and life in my being.
What I do with these days is up to me.

I come here to remember
The lives before mine
As well as the fact that I still have mine to live.

And that is a gift
Even when it feels like a curse.
I have something in me these never get again.

The birds still sing.
The breeze still plays with the trees.
I breathe deeply.

The dead remind me why I'm alive.

I used to hate cemeteries.
I hate the way it reminds me of my memories.
It reminds me how I lost someone and never had the chance to say goodbye.
Telling me I could no longer see him again no matter how much I cry.
It makes me regret of things that should have been and what ifs.
But when I visit you today for the first time, I was relieved that at least there was a place like this.
Where it can prove to me that you were once real.
That you really happened to me.
Your name engraved on the stone makes me remember that once in my life, someone like you existed and loved me.
I realized the true purpose of cemeteries- *to remember.

I don't think that people go to cemeteries
to pay their respects
I think they go
because they need to pretend
that
body is sleeping, only resting
6 feet under
I think that they need the grass to hold on to
So they feel they're not falling
off the Earth
They need to lay the flowers down,
as an apology
"I'm sorry
I have to forget about you."

You’re all skeletons and veins
(or something like that)
Just a pile of bones hanging on an empty frame
With walls that feel too close for comfort
(You romanticize the dark as she sings your name)
I want the moon to light up your bed
And your flesh as we wait for the dark
We’re counting empty minutes so we can feel our ribs as they sink
Finding empty beds of flowers and empty bottles and empty seats
Stones carved in cemeteries with graves emblazoned with no names
Skeletons and souls, we are hanging hearts on empty frames