Tidy Grey Lines [rewritten]

Highways are always so loud.

Highways. Streams of pavement lined by an endless parade of motorized vehicles; cars, trucks, buses. Aggressive drivers, toughened by years of maneuvering both traffic and other incompetent drivers, blare their horns and complain exuberantly from their rolled-down windows. The screech of airplanes overhead and the idle chatter of the occasional pedestrian does nothing to improve the quiet either.  

Highways are always so loud.

So why put a cemetery next to one?

The view from the inside, over the tall arches and run-down fences wasn't idealistic for a tourist attraction. But then again, what tourist would volunteer for a view of such a highway? And from a graveyard nonetheless. Along with the sound of automobiles rolls the deep rumblings of distant thunder; of storm clouds proclaiming their threat of rendering the sunlight out of the throne of the sky. 

But wasn't that the whole point of cemeteries in the first place? To remind us of the ones less able to hold onto the mortal coils wrapped around our hearts, or the ones who held onto it a little too tightly for their own good and snuffed themselves out with it? And, if so, would it be a good idea to place such a reminder directly parallel to a place where more people died than anywhere else in the entirety of the city?

I sneer at a flashing neon-orange sign to the left, a couple meters down from my grave. It's too distant to inform me directly of its message, though there isn't a doubt in my head of its subject; about death, about this graveyard, about traffic. 


If only these spineless passerbys were aware of how many of those whose end the sign had so brutally heralded were buried here. If only they cared enough about remembering the dead, which they were to be eventually anyway, as opposed to an up-coming performance of one would could belch out some notes, or to being en retard for a gathering of flimsy plastic cards. 

To my right, a conservative spire, topped by three singular beams of metal. A chapel. You'd think a chapel would be a more appropriate thing to place next to a graveyard, and I do not protest. That is, only if it were actually populated some time or other. Which it isn't.

Reads the white banner in large red letters in front of the chapel.

The sheer irony of that flagrant sign would have made me burst out laughing, if I had still possessed the will to laugh. What kind of peace would be found next to a main arterial roadway--one used twenty four hours of the day, seven days a week, cars trumpeting their awful noise out over the headstones as if they were not aware what lay under them?

Valley of Peace, my bottom. 

What peace is there in being a prisoner, forever trapped in an imbalanced limbo between reality and spirituality, chained and bound to a decaying corpse? What peace is there in having to bear witness to the same scenery day in and day out until even your spirit begins to decay as well? There’s hardly purpose to that.

The hushed sound of whispered voices is carried by the breeze to my ears, and I turn to see a miniscule group of mourners, gathered around a freshly cut headstone. I turn my gaze back to the highway indifferently; nobody visits my grave anymore. The only ones who had ever bothered to care would be long gone now...moping away on headstones of their own, sulking in their own misery. 


The clouds thickened and the booming clash of electrical particles both lit up the sky and grew thunderous in volume. I look down at my grave once more, At the dead, withered flowers scattered and broken down by erosion, but placed delicately nonetheless over my dead, withered body, and let out a gentle sigh.

Because at the end of the day, not all spirits of the living past manage to be as much of a pessimist as I. And those who do can't not admit that being a burden-less phantom is much more preferable than to a laden mortal. I think this as I watch the first falling droplets of crystalline water land onto the compact rows of stone flowers below by headstone.

It wasn’t dazzling. It wasn’t breathtaking. But it was nice.  

Perhaps there was some peace to be found in these tidy grey lines after all.