Your Headstone Reads “El Muchacho Alegre”
A year ago today I lost someone due to gun violence. This is for you.
I drove to the cemetery. This is where we go when we give our love to dangerous men. Twinkles of light dotted the land, little lights that the bereaved had placed at gravesites so their loved ones would never know the dark. Adan had one too, but I knew that Adan had never feared the dark a day in his life. He and I reveled in the night together, even now, in his death.
It was spring and grass was already covering his plot of land. I couldn’t believe it. There had been something comforting in the look of the raw soil. It stuck out, it called out among all the other graves, ‘Hey! I’m new here, I haven’t been gone long!” When your death is new you’re still everywhere. You’re all over people’s minds, you’re all over people’s hearts, everything reminds everyone of you, every picture you ever took is hanging up somewhere. Your grave gets so many visitors, and not just on your birthday or the day you died. The landscape of your grave is always changing, always new flowers, always new decor. In the beginning, you were covered in roses. Now you lay under grass. As time goes on, fewer visitors will come. But that’s OK. We after all are still stuck here on earth, we have to learn to cope with life without you my darling. It's a good place to come when you want to feel close, but it shouldn’t be an obligation. Because this is not where who we love is. This is the place where bodies become mulch, this is the returning to the earth, the becoming and becoming again. No, Adan is not here, he is, he absolutely is, but just not here. And as the decades continue to roll by, your visitors will die too. They will be in graves of their own, maybe very far away from this one, in their own mulch factories. What is that reunion like? I don’t want to die but I do want to see you again. The newness of death, its fresh and beautiful wound, the comfort that we haven’t lived so much life without you yet. You haven’t missed much down here so far. But yes, those years, they continue, and graves that once proliferated with the outpourings of our heart grow grassy and barren. You’re frozen in time as our lives continue, and continue and continue. One day no one will be around to remember.
But here I was on this night, not even a year into your requiem from the earth. It was still fresh, I was still desperate, and I sobbed with both palms and my face pressed down into his grass. This was all I could do now, touch the land, the flowers, the ornaments that others had left. Un Puño de Tierra. With my fingers laced through the blades of grass, I remembered running them through his obsidian hair, I remembered his face in my hands, his body, all the times I touched him. I remembered him drunk, singing, “el dia que yo me muera que me entierren con la banda”
I laid next to his grave and remembered the last time I had seen Adan. I remembered laying there in his arms on the floor of an empty apartment. I remembered him kissing me wherever he could reach, my head, my cheek, my eye, my lips, my hands, my heart. He was divulging this love that I would need to cling to for the rest of my life. Just those years, that’s all we had. But here I was, still with him, still afraid of the day I would look in the mirror and see wrinkles, and remember that Adan’s face never had a chance to age.
I covered his land in white lilies for humility, the humility of dying, the humbleness of being dead. All the power of life, all the animation of his living, now resigned as he lay in the ground. Devotion, my devotion to him, how my love goes on and on, how in life I was devoted to him no matter how many times he hurt me, no matter how careless he was with his own life. And now even in his death, here I am. Restored innocence after death, all the scars and damage his body had sustained, the opening of his heart at the demand of a bullet, his pain and hurt and any sadness he maintained, his trials, tribulations — it was all absolved, he was new, cradled in his mother’s arms like an infant. I laid these white lilies for beauty, magic, and eternal life. This was my wish for immortality and unfading love. Please don’t forget about me. Life is everlasting my darling. Life is everlasting. So where are you? Are you here with me in my rib? How does that poem go? Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there. I did not die.
