Graveyard Shift

"I tried my best not to cry, so the clouds did it for me."

My heart is a cemetery, and all the bodies are people I once loved. There, I see your grave—freshly buried with my favorite flowers. I contemplate.

I read your name and touch its cold coffin. You were dead to me.

Yet, I hear your laughter and see your smile. You are no longer here with me, yet we remain in the same place. Your iceberg of emotions has transformed into a land of blooming sunflowers, even in my absence.

You are dead. How does one tell if someone is dead? Is it the way you walk past me in the hallway where we once laughed, or the way you now look at me with eyes you used to squint in timidity?

Why are you dead? I insist it’s in the way you now speak with a cold stare and a frigid heart. I insist it’s in how easily you crumple the paper we both worked so hard on. Maybe that’s why you seem dead, even though you are living in the moment.

I used to like killing. I killed the people in my graveyard—they were coffins with no locks. Yet, you killed yourself and placed a cross to keep a demon like me at bay.

You are the only one with a tombstone that has a cross in this poor excuse of a heart that I call my graveyard.