in praise of the gravedigger

a quaint cottage home.
also, it reminds me of "Dead Island"

We walked down the road hand-in-hand, past the ice cream shop and the antique book sellers, past the rows of cottage-style homes bordering the lake, rocking chairs and hammocks strewn about the porticoes. The trees were in full plumage, the leaves a mix-matched patchwork of reds and browns and yellows. She made me come alive, settled my fears, opened my heart, made me know myself more than I ever did. She was and is "beautifully captivating," and more than in those ways that meet the eye. I care for her now even more than I've cared for most. She remains, for better or worse, the litmus test. "We're gonna be alone forever," Ams mused. Maybe our standards are too high. But it's hard not to have high standards when they've been met before, and not just met but set. It's not that I have a list, really, that needs to be checked top-to-bottom, and she crossed off the list in one fell swoop. It's more than that, hard to describe. She brought life, she made it easier to breathe, she made me see and she made me hope, and she continues to do that, over half a year later, even now. She opened my eyes in a way that no one else has, and my eyes remain open. Months after the fact, 'bout half a year, I'm still seeing things differently, and thus I know that what we had is by no means rendered Null & Void. She changed me, I think, and for the better. 

By opening my eyes, she made me see who I wanted to be. Walking through that quiet town on that sunny afternoon, her hand in mind, the quaintness surreal... It felt right, it felt whole, and I can't shake that. "Who do I want to be? What do I want to do with my life?" She shone a light on my heart, and she showed me what had been hidden there all along, what had once been thriving and prosperous but which had shriveled and shrunk to a meager skeleton; and she clothed this skeleton with muscle and sinews and breathed into it life. My dream wasn't gone, it was just buried, and she brought it to the surface, reminding me again of who I was and who I wanted to be. 

I'm fond of saying that it takes two to dig a grave, but only one to fill in the hole that's been made; but maybe the hole shouldn't be refilled at all? If I were to go into chronological, step-by-step detail of how (and why) I've sought to fill that grave year after year, it would go on for paragraphs and paragraphs. I'll spare the grisly and meandering details, only to say that instead of buckling down under the fear, the uncertainty, the paranoia, maybe I should just on the edge of that grave and take a good, hard, long look into it. C. Isaac has a bumper sticker on the back of his car that reads "Where are you going?" Most people fumble through life just letting the waves carry them where they may; and in truth, in many ways, I've lived such a sort of life. But I'm seeing that stagnation is no way to live at all, and conducting your life by the moves dictated by fear and anxiety only tend to send you hurrying in circles, going nowhere fast. I want to be going somewhere; but I need to know where I'm going before I can get on the road, or I'll just end up lost. And as much as lostness may be praised, you don't find anyone who's genuinely lost cherishing it. If I want to go somewhere, the first step is staring into that grave and letting that which I've tried to kill to come up for a breath of fresh air.