I stand alone in a green field, the ground around me slightly wet from the morning rain.
The wind is calm and dreary. The clouds in the sky are blocking the sun with gray puffs of smoke and the air is somewhat humid. In any other circumstances it would be perfectly unnoticeable weather, but now it weighs on me like stone, constantly voyaging to the front of my mind.
Your family made a tombstone. I’ve seen it, but even as they lowered the casket I felt nothing. I couldn’t focus through the rain, I felt like a child impatiently waiting for the sermon to end. You never liked rituals and formal events, so it felt improper to subject you to one. Yet even though I know that, I didn’t protest. In the end, funerals are for the living.
And so I stand alone on this small hill now, not even a tree or a bush marking this place, but a desolate wasteland of greens and small flowers. I’ve never been here before and neither were you. I just walked forward until my legs were too sore to continue, and the horizon met places I’ve never seen.
This spot, a small circle of grass atop a rundown mound, was probably important to someone, sometime, but I will never get to know that. Just as they won’t know that I ever was here, in this place dear to them. Nonetheless, this hill will now be a secret, just for us. I will never tell anyone about it, nor come here ever again, but I will know that among these blades of grass rests not your body but everything that was ever important about you.
I wrote letters back home, handwritten with a newly-bought pen, of the things I would tell you about if we met again. So little time has passed, yet you missed out on so many things already. Just the fact of you knowing, of listening, would be enough; so I tried in my way, aware of the absurdity of my own actions. I planned on burning the letters at first, as if that would mean anything, but I realized that destroying them would be as pointless as making them in the first place.
You will be remembered fondly by some, family members, friends. They will all agree, each of them on their own, to forget your flaws and mistakes and pass in stories only the good. Yet what it matters to you now? Nothing will change, nothing will improve, it’s nothing but a lie perpetuated by fear. Why shall we care to preserve the legacy of something that no longer is?
I hoped to immortalize you at first. Tell every person who would listen, mark you so deeply in art that you would never fade away. Surviving from generation to generation through something immemorial.
However, even that will not last, for there will come a day when even the letters I’ve written will crumble to dust, and every person who heard about you will disappear too.
But, I think, that is enough. You don’t need to last. You’ll live forever tonight.