Her

Sometime in the Past

I CAN HEAR THE DARKNESS. It is like a breeze on a frigid winter’s night that rattles the leafless branches. It is like the cold that travels through your open mouth and down your throat, a frozen kiss stealing your breath. It is like a blizzard that swallows you in its swiftness, blinding behind and before, and side to side. Darkness is winter. It is the end. It is death.

I can hear death.

I can hear it whispering like a phantom swooping through the forest. My name is ever so soft and yet violent as the storm it implies. Death is cloaked in mystery. It is ghoulish in its tasteless form. It is an unspoken secret, perhaps the most well-kept secret of time itself.

Death.

Still, I run my fingers across the granites, the marbles, the pillars of names etched with dates and epitaphs. Someday they will topple and crumble. Children will run over the mound flattened by time and never know they trample upon someone’s lost memories.

Beneath their feet lie the bones of the one who once ran just as they do now. Who once loved. Who once hoped. Who once was sure death was merely a wraith that flittered through their consciousness, but who couldn’t possibly grab ahold of their future.

Now this place is my home. It is where I lay my head to rest. My memories. My dreams. My beating heart. They all cease here, are encased here, and here they will be forgotten.

I hear time.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick . . .

Time is not a friend of hope.

Hope is not found in the grave.