At every school I’ve gone to in my life, there’s always been a graveyard nearby.
First the tiny church cemetery that lay just past the playground fence in elementary school. Then the one shaded by trees along the bus route to middle school. The one down the street from my part-time job throughout high school. My mom always warned me not to go too close to them. “They’re not good places to be. They’ll make you feel sad.”
When I told her I’d be living in Ann Arbor this semester, her mouth instantly turned down at the corners. My apartment squats just 300 feet from the Forest Hill Cemetery.
Take 23 paces from my front door to the end of the corner, then another 8 across the street. You’ll be standing directly in front of the graveyard’s Gothic stone gates, propped open to show a scenic path lined with tombstones that disappears into the hills. I’ve never gone close enough to tell you where it leads.
The cemetery is gorgeous in Autumn when the leaves are just beginning to turn, and even prettier in the Winter. So pretty that sometimes when I’m on a walk nearby I’ll have the urge to waltz through those gates. Today’s walk is one of those times.
It’s 5:37 p.m.
My boots crunch against the snow coating the pavement as I make my way to the end of the corner. My head swivels left, then right, then across the street in one practiced motion. From my vantage point I can see that the February sun is just beginning to set and the snow coating the tombstones is glittering a soft lavender. A shiver runs through me, and I know it’s not from the cold.
I don’t fear the dead, exactly: I just don’t know how to act around them.
Everything that I do around a graveyard feels disrespectful. I remember countless bus rides to school that wound around what seemed like a never-ending landscape of little gray headstones. “Don’t breathe while the graveyard’s in sight!” my neighbor’s kid would yell. “It’s not respectful!” The other sixth graders laughed at her, but then it became a game, everyone trying to hold their breath until their faces turned red. I tried it once, sucking air into my tiny lungs like I was a hot air balloon, but I couldn’t do it. So I just started counting the graves in my head instead every time we passed.
What is it like to not be able to breathe?
The graveyard in front of me now is peaceful in the sunset, inviting me in. But I know there are too many graves beyond those gates for me to count.
They’ll make you feel sad.
I turn around and trace my way back home.
***
It’s 12:14 p.m.
“Y’know, the way you sleep is funny.”
I look up from my bowl at my roommate, a spoonful of tomato soup halfway to my mouth. Her face is twisted into the wry smile of someone about to tell a joke.
“Every night when I come up to the room you’re already asleep — flat on your back! — and your arms are always folded up…here.” She flops theatrically onto the sofa and demonstrates, folding her hands up on her navel. “You look like an honest-to-god corpse.”
I almost spit out my soup with laughter. “Am I a peaceful corpse?” I ask teasingly. “Or like one that’s halfway to being a zombie?”
At that the smile drops off her face and she starts toying with the fringe on the carpet. After a minute of awkward silence she finally looks back at me and says, “The expression on your face…it always looks like you’re in the middle of your own worst nightmare.”
It’s 2:08 a.m.
The sky is dark and I’m still awake. After a moment of hesitation I reach a hand under my pillowcase and grab a familiar piece of paper, careful not to wake my sleeping roommate, and dart out to the living room.
It’s a scrap of crumpled graph paper ripped out of a notebook, with all the perforation fuzz on the side still attached. At first glance it’s just a bunch of scribbles. Look closer and you’ll see it’s covered in thousands of tiny, misshapen circles.
I refresh the same tab on my computer that I refreshed yesterday and stare at the blocks of charts and lists and statistics. The number 482,536 is the largest, and it stares back at me. No two digits the same.
I pull out my calculator and punch in a few numbers. 3,317 new deaths. I smooth the paper out on the table and write -3,317 lives in the margin on the paper along with the date. With my ink-stained fingers, I uncap a black pen and begin to draw, adding one new circle at a time.
I use a simple scale: 100 deaths = 1 circle. 10,000 deaths = 100 circles. 482,536 = 4825, but it’s not exact, which bothers me. At this point in the pandemic there’s more ink than paper visible. My fingers are numb and shaky from the cold and the lines come out wobbly. No two shapes are the same.
At 3:00am I creep back to bed. I sleep on my side and dream about all the losses I’ll never be able to count.
***
It’s around 3:30-ish p.m.
“Are you okay? You look stressed.” my friend says to me over Zoom. We’re three hours deep into a never-ending homework assignment. Today I can’t seem to remember how to do basic calculus, which is a problem when you’re an engineering major.
“No, scratch that, you look like a straight-up zombie,” she amends. “How have you been holding up? Want to talk about what’s going on?”
I know she’s right. I can’t even remember if I washed my face this morning. But the tips of my ears flare up anyway. In that moment I resent her, this friend who is so easily able to poke at things inside me that aren’t ready to see the light.
“I know things have been hard for your family…” she starts.
I dig in my heels.
A spark leaps up my throat and before I can shove it back down I blurt, “Shut up. I don’t want to talk about it, ok? I don’t want to talk about anything.”
Her expression morphs from bewildered to hurt. “What? Why? I’m just checking up on you. I know it’s been hard for you, girl, but it hasn’t been easy for me either.”
I say “I’m sorry,” and leave the Zoom call in two clicks before I have to hear her response.
It’s probably 5:00 p.m.
I don’t bother to check the weather. As soon as I step outside the front door, a sharp gust of wind blows and stings all the places that my scarf and gloves don’t cover. Like every other day, the sidewalk wraps around and the buildings taper off until it’s suddenly just the graveyard gates beside me. I stop in my tracks instinctively and wonder again if I should just head back.
I peer through the gates, and thoughts of leaving fall away. The hills are so indescribably beautiful, all blanketed in falling snow. I back up so far I almost tumble into the road, trying to burn the sight into my memory.
Standing just outside the fence, I count the monuments that I can see. Each one has its own personality. There’s a tall angel with a bowed head, and a miniature sculpture of the Cube, and lots of stout little headstones carved out of black stone. Some have wreaths with red ribbons propped against them. My eyes snag on the ones that lay barren. Three steps forward and I could be through the gate.
There’s a flash of movement in the corner of my eye. My mom’s superstitions come rushing back to me, but I only see a squirrel perched on the fence. It pauses and stares straight at me, and we stay there like that for a few seconds, completely still. Does it know that I’m a living thing too? Just as I finish the thought, the creature bounds away.
I’ve lingered too long — I turn around and head back to my burrow as well.
***
After 4:00pm I think.
It’s Sunday. Since this morning I’ve been having coughing fits that come without warning, sending me into a hacking, gravelly-voiced mess. My roommates exchange worried glances and ask what to do. I don’t say a word in any of my classes.
My mom calls around dinnertime. I strategically mute myself in between my sentences, but she instantly picks up on my ragged breathing.
“Can you still smell? Take some cinnamon and see if you can smell it. You’re young, you’ll be alright. I hope.”
In her voice I hear worry tinged with a sadness so deep it feels like it might swallow me. I remember the phone call from a month ago that bore news we only heard in our worst nightmares. In that moment I wish I could absorb all her grief into myself like a sponge, if only to give her one peaceful night’s sleep. But no words come out.
“Oh God, I hope it’s not COVID…I’m going to go pray. I love you. Don’t go outside, okay?”
A tiny, spiky gray ball materializes in my mind. I imagine it snagging on the edges of my lungs, filling up my throat.
What is it like to not be able to breathe?
??? a.m.
On Monday night a snowstorm sweeps the Eastern United States.
The CDC website takes a long time to refresh. Too long.
When it finally loads, I’m greeted with the same numbers as yesterday, with the message:
In observance of President’s Day, the COVID Data Tracker will not update on Monday, February 15. Updates will resume on Tuesday, February 16.
I click on a different link. A giant map of my country loads slowly on the screen, pixel by pixel.
Each region on the map is colored in with a slightly different shade of orange, starting from the lightest peach. Some are so dark that it looks like someone took a hot poker and burned the screen. I search for some key or chart to translate the colors into numbers, but there isn’t one. My calculator lies useless on the table. My graph paper is so scratched and soaked with the weight of the ink that it’s about to disintegrate in my hands.
I have been trying to comprehend that weight for months, but I’ve always sucked at math.
I call my mom without thinking. To my surprise she picks up and greets me with a sleepy “Still up? Stressed about an exam?”
“What was it like for you when he passed away?” I say, and before the words are out of my mouth I’m in tears. “Why don’t I feel sad now like you do?”
I hear her breath hitch in her throat.
“It’s not like I didn’t love him, I just don’t feel anything. There have been so many more, Ma. How do you go on?”
“You don’t need to feel sad,” she says. “Do you understand? Grief and sadness are not the same thing.” She lapses into a long silence, and it’s the most painful and beautiful silence I’ve ever heard.
All this time I’ve been counting and counting and counting. I draw circles and walk in circles trying to make all the deaths feel loud and real and big and close. But no language of numbers or letters could answer my unspoken question: How do I keep on breathing?
“I’ll try to understand,” I answer. We sit there, breathing and remembering.
At night I dream that I’m looking at Forest Hill Cemetery from above with a giant bag of orange markers, staining the snow light and dark with all the different shades. Then the colors all bleed out back to white, and the land is peaceful again.
***
I don’t know what time it is, but the sun is up and I’m awake. It’s cold but bright: a good day for a walk.
I head out the door, but this time I don’t stop and do my left-right head-swivel. I know where I’m going.
My feet take me straight through the stone gates and down the bumpy walking path. I shuffle slowly along the winding road, making sure my eyes land on each headstone. For the first time I’m close enough to read some of the names of the buried: Dunning, Domino, Dobson. Three families each missing a little piece like mine.
The fallen snow is so gorgeous and the stones so peaceful that I impulsively laugh out loud in delight before immediately clamping my hands over my mouth, embarrassed. The hill beneath me is slippery, and the abrupt motion makes me lose my balance and skid precariously on the snow. I can’t see the incline very well, and my mask makes it hard to breathe.
I lose my footing on the ice and clumsily fall face-first into a snowdrift on the side of the path with a soft “fwump!”. There’s not another living thing in sight, but I am absolutely mortified.
Disrespectful!
“Sorry about that!” I huff to no one in particular. I stand up again and turn in a circle, panting. “I can’t…catch my breath. Just…another thing we have in common…huh?”
The gravestones just twinkle back at me in the sun.
There’s snow and ice everywhere: it’s in my socks, under my collar, dusting the ends of my hair.
The sadness is unshackled now. I notice it settling in me, nibbling at the edges of my heart. But I’m still smiling. The sun and the cold make me feel alive.
Anonymous | February 11-16, 2021 | Ann Arbor, Michigan