I have been to this graveyard so many times -in the night, especially- that I no longer need a flashlight. I navigate the old graves with ease, dodging the rocks, plants and flowers, until finally reaching the one I want.
I fall to my knees, sink my hands in the earth and whisper, “I missed you.”
Missing is a hard thing to define. Like after summer break everyone always says “I missed you” but that’s not really true because everyone knows that September will come and the missing will end. In September everyone will be back.
Real missing is impossible to cure. It settles into the stomach like a giant wad of gum. It pulls you down and makes you want to curl up inside yourself to fill up the hole.
Sitting here, amongst the dead, helped. Here, the missing went numb. Not fixed but numb, and I guess that’s enough. But school was hard to get through and spending all night in a graveyard began to have a significant impact on my grades. My tightly-wound mother was terrified that I was dropping into depression so she amped up my therapy appointments from one day a week to two. My mother held onto the belief that therapy could cure anyones problems.
Yet I stopped visiting the graveyard because I couldn’t dare tell Dr. Rescnid the real reason I was failing school. I dragged my grades up and woke up earlier and smiled every time my mom was around. After school visits were out of the question, too, because I had to get a job. A job would keep me from moping around the house, according to my mother. I didn’t think a job was any better for my mental health but it kept her satisfied.
I pulled my grades up enough and persuaded my mom to drop my therapy visits from two to one. I went to my job and did my homework and felt like I was normal again. Except maybe the dreams.
“I feel like I’m a drug addict,” I whisper into the granite. “It’s like, if I don’t get my fill of you I go through withdrawal or something. Last night, I screamed so loud the neighbors called the police. Pam was mortified.” Pams my mother. She thinks that calling her by her first name is my attempt to reject her as a mother or something. I never said it to anyone else.
“But you know, it’s really hard to get my fill of you.” I trace my finger across the familiar letters on the stone.
Samuel Kent Cowden
June 17, 1992- March 23, 2010
June 17, 1992- March 23, 2010
He hated his middle name, something that I never really understood. Middle names don’t matter, I would explain to him. He would just grimace like a child at it would make me laugh.
It took some prodding on my part to even get him to admit it. I remembered that afternoon so clearly it makes me ache. It was too cold to go anywhere but inside so we sat in the corner of a little cafe on the edge of town. My homework was splayed across the table because I couldn’t keep spending all my afternoons with him without doing my homework. But taking it out was the extent of the doing, despite my efforts. Anyway, I was determined to figure out his middle name.
“But I told you mine!” I picked up one of his hands and held it tight to my chest, “it’s only fair.”
He grinned at me and glanced at his hand in mine, “I don’t think so,” he countered, “Anyway, yours is pretty, Casey Jane. It sounds like a song.” My heart fluttered the way he said my name and I dropped his hand, afraid he could feel it.
I reached for my phone from the other side of the table, “Fine, I’ll just ask Zach, I’m sure he’ll tell me.”
His eyes darkened at the mention of his best friend, my boyfriend (soon to be ex, I often assured him - but still.) I instantly regretted it, opened my mouth to make some excuse but he dropped it as fast as it had come up. “Yeah, because that wouldn’t be random and out of the blue.” He laughed, thankfully. “Anyway, he doesn’t know it.”
“Zach, doesn’t know it?” I stared at him in disbelief. “How can he not know it? You’ve known each other since what-”
“Sixth grade,” He answered and then shrugged, “it just never came up.”
We were both silent for a moment and my phone started to feel hot in my hand. I dropped it and it landed softly between us. Finally he said, “it’s Kent.” Both our eyes were drawn from my cellphone to each other. “Like the god-dammed Barbie Doll but with a T. Kent. Don’t ask.”
I smiled at him, “I don’t think it’s dumb.” And after a moment, “It’s like... Clark Kent.”
“Superman?” He said doubtfully.
“Yes. Like Superman’s secret identity. You’re Superman!” I declared, getting excited.
“If I’m Superman,” he began. “Then does that make you Lois Lane?”
And I just blushed. Because things were so simple back then.
~-~-~
I never did any of the things one would typically expect from a girl who spent her nights in a graveyard. I don’t practice Witchcraft, or write depressing poetry, or contemplate life after death. I don’t do much, sometimes, hardly anything; just lie there, my mind blank. Often, I would talk to Sam, like we used to. But always, inevitably, he would creep into my mind and it’d be impossible not to remember.
~-~-~
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
The moment the word left my mouth I regretted my harshness, my childishness, but Zach was already slamming the door of his car. The black SUV roared to life and began to back out of the space. I shivered in my thin sweater and wrapped my arms around myself. The weather in October was always so unpredictable and today it was finally starting to feel like fall. Too early for fall- but it always came too early.
Zach drove out of the lot quickly, his dark eyes furrowed into an angry scowl. I felt bad for making him feel like that. I hadn’t meant to get mad. These days it felt like I had no control over my emotions.
Sam stood awkwardly across from me, his thin build not quite comfortable up against the side of his car. His key dangled on the end of a lanyard around his finger. He offered me an apologetic grin. I buried my face in my hands, now embarrassed that he had witnessed the whole exchange.
“It’s okay,” He offered in a tone that suggested he was trying to talk down a child. I guess that was deserved, seeing as I’d just nearly thrown a tantrum. I waved my hand dismissvely at him and turned to leave. “Hey, wait,” he called. “Do you want a ride home?”
The last thing that I wanted was a ride home, hadn’t that been what the fight with Zach had been about? Me trying desperately to avoid my house? Not him neglecting me as I had wrongly accused him of in my attempt to get him to spend time with me. I wondered if the divorce lawyers would be there, sitting at the kitchen table with big briefcases and papers that lay out the terms and conditions that my parents must abide to in order to never have to deal with each other again.
I shook my head, “It’s okay, I’d rather walk.”
His brows furrowed, “You’ll freeze. Didn’t you at least bring a coat?” He was right of course, the heat of my anger was starting to wear off, no longer protecting me from the chilled air. While I was considering he added, “But I don’t need to take you home if that’s not where you want to go.”
Once in Sam’s warm car it was easy to convince myself that there was nothing wrong with getting a ride home with your boyfriends best friend. And there wasn’t, really, anything wrong with it, we were just talking.
“So, what’s the real reason you didn’t want to go home?” We’d gotten drinks at the McDonalds drive-thru and were sitting in the parking lot in Sam’s car. His feet where lounging on the dash beside the steering wheel. I had my legs tucked up on the seat, my chin resting on my knees and my straw in my mouth.
I colored at his question. I’d given him the lame excuse that my house was just boring, that I didn’t have anything to do there. He’d recounted story after hilarious story while I sat and listened, laughed and loosened up. But now I was on the spot, I hesitated.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “But trust me, I’m no stranger to family troubles.”
I hadn’t really told anyone about what was going on at my house. My parents had split when I was 11. My father had gotten an apartment close by and my mother had gotten me to a shrink. But now my father was getting remarried so he needed a divorce and my mother was not having it.
“Stupid divorce,” I muttered. “Like my parents won’t be happy until the other one is dead, you know.” He nodded and I got the impression that he really did know.
“Parents,” he said, grinning. “Can’t live with ‘em... but have to anyway.”
~-~-~
It was three months after The Accident that I stumbled upon Sam’s grave. For a while, Hollow Stones Graveyard was the place in town that I concentrated all my energy into avoiding. Just driving down any of the surrounding streets gave me chills.
But on this afternoon in late June I was determined not to sit around the house. My mother had a new boyfriend and wanted the whole world to know. I think I liked it better when she was single, crabby and miserable. Maybe because then we had something in common.
I pulled on my sneakers that afternoon thinking that maybe I would go for a run. It was a nice day, low 70s and sunny. I would run just long enough that I would be drenched in sweat when I returned home, justification for taking an hour in the shower.
I used to run a lot, cross country and track & field, until The Accident when I would purposely skip out on meets. My mother found out after about the fifth meet and asked me how I expected things to go back to normal, her accusations cut deep as if she believed it was my own fault that I felt like this. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t want things to go back to normal, because normalcy meant acting like Sam didn’t matter, normalcy meant forgetting.
I started jogging down the street, letting my body fall into the pattern that had been forgotten. I didn’t pay attention to where I was going, let my mind go blank and my legs set the path.
I wasn’t even surprised when I found myself underneath the iron archway of the graveyard, slightly winded, a sheer line of sweat resting on my upper lip, dripping down my temple.
I found Sam easily, my mind filling with the images of the funeral. It looked so different then, when the snow was just beginning to melt and everything came out in different shades of grey. It looked so dead. It had terrified me, it had made me sick. But now the flowers were in bloom, pinks and blues and yellows and greens were everywhere so that one could hardly believe this place was filled with dead people. Dead, I couldn’t even comprehend that word.
The green grass was fresh above him, shimmery and freshly cut. Last time I’d been here it had been dirt. I hesitated, unsure of what to do now. Part of me wished I’d brought flowers, something I could give to him, pay my respects. But Sam wouldn’t want flowers because what would that mean? It would mean I had a dollar to spend, not that I cared.
Instinctively, I moved forward, kneeling onto the soft grass wondering how to convey my sorrow to a pile of earth. I dug my fingers through the blades, thinking of Sam’s hair and how I used to run my fingers through it. It was light at the tips and a deep brown at the roots. I remembered how it got progressively darker as winter closed in on us. “It get’s lighter in the summer,” he told me. “You’ll see.” But of course, I never did see.
I looked at the stone, still fresh, and my knees that sunk into the Earth. Without even thinking, I said “Hi.” I paused, as if expecting an answer, but there was none. I continued, “I miss you.” Another pause. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. “You would probably think I was crazy, if you saw me talking to a grave,” I said. “But you have no right to call me crazy. You left me. I have every right to be as crazy as I want.”
Tears started to well up in my eyes but I blinked them back, pressing my palms into the ground. “You missed the wedding,” I told him, thinking back to my father getting remarried, “you were supposed to save me, remember? Pam tried to use what happened to you as an excuse to keep me from going. She said it wasn’t good for my mental state.” I paused again, imagining Sam laughing. My mothers obsession with my mental state was a cause for constant jokes. Of course, recently, her concern was legitimate. There was no laughter, though. Only a dog barking, a car starting up in the distance, not even wind in the still summer air.
“It was actually kind of funny, though. I didn’t do much, dance or anything, because it was all old people. I just sat there and drank champagne and no one even questioned it. I drank a lot of champagne and by the time Pam came to get me I was completely wasted.” I added with a laugh, “you would have loved it.”
“Pam was furious, of course, and told my dad he wasn’t a responsible parent and whatever. She said that, obviously, he cares more about his own happiness then my well-being. But then he got all mad and said that she had told me to get drunk in order to ruin his wedding night. I swear, those people give each other way to much credit.” I found myself laughing, knowing that Sam would have made this moment comical, make it not hurt. It hadn’t been funny at the time, nor had it been funny the next morning when, head pounding, I had to sit in front of Dr. Rescnid who explained to me that alcohol was not the way to solve ones problems. But now it was funny, with Sam it was funny, even though he couldn’t reply back.
I sprawled onto the grass so that every inch of me was buried into the earth. “I still love you,” I said.
Part two... on it's way!
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