Poem: Broken Crayons

What’s the point?

There is no point

We’re all broken crayons

Living in the box

Destroying each other’s colors

By dulling our own. 

Prompt: Land of Bones

 Entering the Land of Bones

The shutter of the camera broke the silence of the land of the bones lovingly deemed a cemetery.  No one was dying to get in because the inhabitants stopped filtering some time ago. But that’s the thing about cemeteries. Eventually, there will be no more room for casual passers on to the afterlife. The entrance will one day grow over with bramble vines and kudzu, crosshatching natures “do not enter”. The grounds' foot-worn paths will grow over with grass, and a fine layer of dust will start layering on each headstone as memories begin to fade. 

But I’m here.

I hopped the fence so as not to disturb the vines, barring my way past its ornate wrought iron gates. The overgrown brush, bushes, and willow trees weep and spill back into the ground below, creating a shield from nosey, prying eyes. The ponds laid still as mirrors, the headstones poking out like rounded, and sometimes jagged, monster teeth from the land of death below.

Nighttime in the cemetery was my favorite because the sounds of cars were few and far between, and the glow of the moon illuminated the natural canopy of oaks, willows, and other stately trees left undisturbed by its peaceful and quiet inhabitants. The fauna grew to feel like it was taking back what was once theirs, and the tombstones became laced with floral-baring vines, a testament to life after death. 

My ex used to cringe when I told him about my monthly forays past the gates and into the peaceful landscape; he once told me that he wouldn’t be caught dead here.

The joke was on him, though, because we would all end up here.

My footsteps crunched through the dead leaves, signaling a Florida Autumn as I traipsed to the back of the sprawling property. The cemetery was historic, slapped in between two plantation-style mansions with equally sprawling landscapes and beachfront access. 

Which was why I was here.

Not the mansions, of course; don’t be silly. I was a strange girl more interested in capturing the moonlight’s glow off of one hundred-plus-year-old tombstone than capturing the architectural genius of a plantation house built on the bay of one of the hardest-hit hurricane zones known to man. 

I lived simply.

So I shot simply.

When I get to the back chain link, I push a few vines aside on the adjoining cinder block half wall before going up and scrambling up the few makeshift steps to the top.

One day, I won’t be as agile, but I will remember through photos.

I crouched down carefully, letting my gaze rotate from the sparkling lights across the bay to the silence of the cemetery down below me butted up against bay cliffs. 

Call me crow as I sit down on my perch. The protector of the dead, the defender of silence, as I adjust my camera in my lap and take in the scene before me under the full moon's light. 

I loved it here, but I couldn’t imagine laying to rest in a single area. I wished to be cremated, scattered all over, a wandering soul, even in the afterlife, with my headstone claiming my steak on land that was never mine.

In death, I hoped not to take up space, just as I tried not to do while living. It’s so selfish to think we should own a piece of land stolen from others. In death, why should it be any different?

But they didn’t know any better. 

I lift my camera and adjust the lens, just in time to see the past coming back to life. 

Prompt: Weaver

She weaved scraps of human interaction into friendships, hoped they would hold, and cried when those fickle threads broke. At the end of the day, she was the last one on the list and never thought about twice as she watched everyone live on without a whisper from her. So she unwove pieces of her from the scraps of others to maybe untether herself from all the bothers she thought she became. The quiet of strangers was more sought out than the gaze of faraway friends and fake, temporary lovers. In place of conversation, she lost herself in fictional worlds with characters who felt more like home than any house she had ever lived in. She stopped reaching out, inquiring, and refused to beg to be seen because at what point was there tugging on invisible strings? 

No one would call or wonder why she was quiet, and no thought would be given to her avoidance of people she admired or her choice to step away from trying to be heard. They ripped her to shreds and then expected the world from her when she calmly exhaled her silent frustration over never fitting inside the box others made her. She saw more hope in the quiet of her four walls, where she scribbled her hopes and dreams between wallpaper lines and hidden in monstera vines. No one inside those four walls condemned her as strange because characters from books don’t know you exist.