Notice Me

16

I was stuck.

Of course, I wasn't really stuck, but it felt like I was. As I stood on the narrow path that was the entrance to the cemetery, it felt like my feet were cemented to the ground. It felt like a sick and twisted metaphor for purgatory, looking forward to the open gates just feet ahead of me. I couldn't move forward, I couldn't move backwards.

I was stuck.

I breathed through my nose, closing my eyes as I tried to find the strength to walk into the hollowed ground. I didn't want to go in there. I didn't want to look at Henry's gravestone, because if I looked at his gravestone, it meant I was looking at Henry's gravestone. 

It meant that he was dead and gone, and what's left of him was under the ground beneath my feet. I didn't want to picture him dead and gone and under my feet. I wanted to picture him alive, I wanted to picture him somewhere that was better than here. I wanted to picture him in heaven. I wanted to picture him flying through the clouds with that smile I missed so dearly on his face.

I didn't want to picture him in the ground.

The cemetery was empty, it was just me here. Well, just me and the hundreds of dead bodies below me. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, because the only time I had been in a cemetery before was when they lowered his casket into the ground. It was different then. Everything was sharp, like the blade of a hunting knife. The colours were sharp in my memories, like it had been filmed in high definition. But, the sharpest thing of all was the pain.

I gritted my teeth as I pushed forward, finally breaking free from the purgatory I had been trapped in for the last ten minutes. Though, I wasn't sure what I was moving into, I wasn't sure what fresh pain was awaiting me. I did it anyway, because somewhere deep inside me, I knew I had to.

I knew Henry was right, just like Cass was. I knew I had to move on, I knew I had to let go. It seemed like an impossible task, because I wasn't sure I could ever really let it all go. And, maybe a part of me was scared to let it all go- because if the guilt, and the pain and the grief isn't there anymore, what will fill the empty space?

I walked like my body was a metal detector and his headstone was the metal buried deep beneath the ground, like my muscles had memorized the very spot we had all gathered at close to a year ago. Had it really been a year?

How does a year just vanish?

My stomach fell as I saw his name. It was there, just like I knew it would be. My eyes traced the headstone, looking over it completely as if I needed to see each and every inch of it. It looked fresh, new compared to the aged stones beside it. Even though it was a grey day, and there was light raindrops falling all around me- the headstone still sparkled. The light grey rock it was made of was shining with black and silver speckles scattered on the surface, they caught the faint rays of sun that were poking through those grey clouds and made it glimmer ever so slightly.

His name hit me like a brick to the face, but even more painful was what was beneath his name.

Henry Douglas Howard
January 12, 2001 — September 24 2018
A loving son and friend.
There is beauty everywhere, remember to see it.

Like an ocean wave had crept down the beach, rushing over my body in a way I wasn't prepared for, I felt every emotion possible in the seconds it took me to read the writing.

Though, my eyes kept going back to the dash that separated the two dates. That dash, it was so small. It was a tiny detail, lost when compared to the importance of the other details. But to me, that dash was everything because it was everything. That dash was Henry's life, his entire life. His entire existence was that dash. His memories, his pain, his suffering, his joys, his triumphs. It all happened in that dash.