To Pay Your Respects at Your Headstone

I am kneeling, positioned for penance, earth tucked neatly under my knees. Staring at you, watching as you lie there unmoving.

Your dress cerulean and laced, hair billowed around your shoulders and nape, shoes polished and glinting, nails trimmed and painted, your skin gaunt and pale, your hands cold and brittle. You are gone, never to walk this land again and to find refuge somewhere else. Death has exiled you.

You had gripped my hands before, pulling me up towards the ravine, the stream gurgling as it chokes upon itself around the burnished stones embedded deep, deep into the riverbed’s soil. With eyes like dusk, you asked me.

‘Why do you no longer scream? No longer howl and cry and relieve your temptations?’

‘I have no need to anymore, I am well now.’

‘You have no need for bless-ed freedom? To be reckless and wrong, to throw yourself against the wall and watch it bruise, to cry till your skin stings, to prick till you have bled, that is to be free.’

‘I am well.’ I whisper, you need not hear it but I must. I must hear it for myself.

The ravine is still bubbling, congregations of small bubbles collect near the broadleaf weeds, lasting seconds and never much more, but they will have existed for just the right amount of time.

I turn my back, leaving you with your hallowed cries pleading me to stay - vowing I will never know happiness, you curse me with hatred hot on your breath and shallow breath. You scream and scream but I will never look back. I will never be you again, you will never be me. But I mourn you nonetheless.