lives

Here in Denton there's a cemetery right close to the UNT campus. An old one, surrounded by high fences, but there's always a gate open whenever I go by there, no matter what time of day, night, morning, gloaming, or whenever. I'm always over there at night, though.

Olden graves are something of a comfort to me because my dad used to take us kids to olden cemetery plots in East Texas... just to be there, you know. To imprint the experience on a young brain. I remember those cemetery visits from 30-40 years ago, so nowadays I approach cemeteries as a place where I'd like to be. With a young, dreamy feeling.

I go into that cemetery here in Denton sometimes, like tonight, when I'm wandering around, restless and with nothing to do, but not ready to hit the end of it yet. I go into there and look at lots and lots of graves. It's easy to lose myself in the looking at all of those names, all of those lives. Lives like mine, that meant something once, to someone, and I'm only catching the thin, foamy froth of the ocean of that life, by seeing that headstone, with the name and date, and sometimes a personal inscription.

If I dwell on this stark reality of never knowing the texture of all the lives around me, alive and visible, alive and behind closed doors, dead and cold and buried and forever unknowable, I'll begin to despair with profound grief. If I let that feeling grow, it'll start to hurt so bad that it passes beyond my comprehension, the feeling of it, and I'll reboot back to just being confused and a little depressed. I can account for the process of it now, because it's happened so many times before.