I, Taphophile

It's strange that at 27, my thoughts, like some kind of nightmarish merry-go-round, keep circling back to growing old. Fixed in a state of purgatory, I am both and neither. Not quite as young as I once was, but also, not quite old. For most of my life, my friends have always been older than me, and would often be surprised to learn my age. Old soul, they'd say. Even as a small child, my best friend was my grandfather; with his bum-knees and socks that crawled up the length of his shins. Some of my earliest memories are of being in the cemetery with him while he washed his car and paid respects to deceased relatives. In a totally non-macabre way.

I remember running through the rows of tombstones, looking at flowers placed on top of graves. Drawn to them because they seemed so out of place; bright and soft against the hard dark stone. Sometimes the flowers would be placed at the sides of the gravestones, seeming to hug them, like a small child clinging affectionately to a parent's legs. But the stones always looked so...grave. Shaped like the hollow of an arched-doorway, a frown turned to stone. Immovable and impenetrable. As a child the symbolism was lost on me, but now.

While he washed the car I would gather up small balls of dirt and throw them against any available hard surface, giggling as I watched them turn to dust. Again, the symbolism was lost on me. Excitedly, I would run and jump, hoping to catch hold of a low-hanging limb of a weeping willow.  Other times I would watch the squirrels scurry about, moving as though pursued by ghosts.

I grew to enjoy the peace and solitude of the cemetery. It was my playground. I wonder if the dead beneath my feet felt threatened, or perhaps taunted, while I marauded immune to their disease. Older now, I see that the conversations I had with stoic stones taught me to listen; their roses gave me an appreciation for beauty, for the gentility of the willow; for the power of the breeze to make the dead dance. Surrounded always, by Hermetic inscriptions carved into tablets - the writing on the wall - letters and numbers that I couldn't yet read foretold my fate. It was unknowable, like a cat's reflection cast in glass.

I suppose it can be argued that these events didn't shape me; that I couldn't help but be anything but me. There must have existed in me a sensitivity which allowed me to apprehend things as I did. Had I been exposed to a completely different set of circumstances, I would have approached them with the same alacrity, extracting meaning from any experience, and nothing would be different. Perhaps.

The answer, I think, lies buried somewhere in the middle; taciturn as a cryptogram on a tomb.