The Graveyard

The cemetary's been there since I was a kid.

I've never been to it. It's only up the hill, just a short walk through a rather beautiful patch of woods, but something about it has always scared me off. When I was a child, it was the idea of all those dead people, only six feet below the ground, waiting for nothing, watching with empty gazes. I didn't know what I would find there, and that scared me.

When I was seven, my father was killed in a car accident only three miles up the road from where I lived. The funeral was rather pitiful. Thirty years of love and life, ended by an unexcited old man reciting Bible verses that fulfilled nobody inside, though we pretended to be relieved of part of a pain.

Then my father was buried in the graveyard up the hill, and the fear of it only worsened. Sometimes I awoke from nightmare dreams where I met him in the graveyard. Sometimes he would hug me. Othertimes he would scream and yell until I cried myself awake.

Eventually, I determined that it was time to go to the graveyard. I'm not sure how I made this decision. It had probably stewed in my subconscious, cooked in nightmares and pain until it finally broke through the thin veil protecting my consciousness.

One morning, on a Saturday, while the world was drowsy and unmoving, I dressed in warmer gear and, as quietly as I could, crept out of the house.

I don't remember much after that. Just tree fronds and terrible fear. I was so lost in my own thoughts that even when I reached the old cemetary, I was twenty or thirty feet into the grounds before I even realized I had arrived.

Immediately, my heart was in my throat. I was finally here, after avoiding it since I had been born. It was too late to turn back; the demons I had stirred up had already seen me.

I walked slowly through the graveyard, glancing left and right, and it took me a moment to realize I was looking for ghosts.

I found his grave relatively quickly. How I found it, I'm not sure, but it was almost as if I had been drawn to it, with little choice, like a light beckoning to my very soul.

The name was easy to read. Andrew Zavil. The gravestone said only that, and his birth and death date. There were no other words on the stone. As though the people who had buried him had simplified his entire life to a name and a date range.

The next thing I knew, I was crying, hugging his gravestone, and even as I realized it I felt no need to stop, to quell the tears pouring down my face. I hadn't cried, not in the weeks since his death, but simply stayed empty, tried not to risk allowing emotions to grow simply to die.

I remembered his face. How he laughed when I made small messes at dinner rather than getting angry.

Soon, the storm inside was gone. The sun was rising overhead, and the light made the fall leaves surrounding me seem to glow.

I remembered being so afraid of the graveyard. I was afraid of ghosts, or the dead. But the only thing to be afraid of, I realized walking home, was memories.