A Visit to Graveyard

Have you ever visited a cemetery or a graveyard? Especially early in the morning or late at night?

Well, I have. Not just once, but quite often.

But you wouldn’t know that. Would you?

The truth is - I haven’t told anyone about it. People don’t want to be around someone who is a regular visitor to the place of dead. Not that anyone wants to be around me normally. I am more of a loner kind of guy.

You might have seen someone who is always moving around the place so quietly, accompanied by nobody.

While enjoying a meal with your friends in canteen, you might have noticed a guy who always eats alone and quietly at one of the corner tables.

Yeah, I am one of those guys who don’t really exist unless someone points them out.

People often call me a weirdo. And that is precisely why I don’t want to give any more concrete reasons to prove them right.

Never mind them. Even you would think of me as some sort of psycho- ‘Visiting graveyards so often, early in the mornings or late at nights!’- What kind of a normal person does that?

Well. I suppose everyone has their own ways of enjoying their time. And this is my idea of spending quality time- Alone, in a graveyard, in the middle of all those people who are sleeping alone, and quietly beneath the ground… perhaps, waiting for someone to wake them up.

Whenever I feel like I want to be in someone’s company, I go and visit a cemetery. The dead are so welcoming and patient. And they never ever judge me.

People have this habit of judging me. Even if they say, that they don’t judge; they do. And there’s literally zero patience left in them. They are always like a volcano- always ready to explode at the slightest hint of offense. And literally everything, these days, can offend them.

Not that I have anyone to really be with. No. I don’t have anyone.

And that is all the more reason I feel a strange kind of warmth in the company of dead. A strange kind of bond, I feel with them, all of them. And quite often I have sensed that bond materialize in a palpable form and let me feel them with my humanly senses.

Perhaps the dead are not really dead the way we think they are. They might have left their bodies. But should that really mean that they are gone forever? May be not…

But people don’t really want to do anything with them once they have left their physical body. And they are not wrong. No. They are not. They are just normal.

That is why I go and visit a graveyard whenever I feel lonely, and crave for someone’s company.

Because, every time I go there, I find myself surrounded with life. There are so many people there, and each one is so welcoming that I forget my loneliness. I can’t really see them (not until they let me). But I do feel their presence around me.

You might get scared at first, should you ever try and spend some time in a cemetery. But if you ever get to feel them, perhaps you will see that they are also humans like us- A better version, if you see…

And just like us, they want to be remembered. They have stories to tell, their entire life stories; stories far better than you would ever here from living people. I listen to them all the times. And that is one more reason why I spend my time with them. I now feel a personal kind of connection with all those dead people there. It would sound ridiculous to any normal ear, but I now feel at home in a graveyard and a cemetery. It feels like a big family.

I don’t know if I should call it happy. But I feel connected, with all of them…

Not long ago, when I was sitting quietly nearby one of the graves in a graveyard- it was around 4:20 am in the morning- when I felt the presence of one of the fellow dead man. He gave me a warm welcoming hug, and sat close by me, over his own grave. Then he shared this sad truth with me-

“You know, boy! All these people here, including me, we are someone’s loved ones. Or we were, at some point in time. But now, most of us have been forgotten- Forgotten even by our own people, who ones loved us more than their lives…” I could feel the intensity of that pain multiply in thin air and tug at my soul. “I am glad that you come here to visit us, boy,” he told me, “It feels good to know that someone still cares about us…”

They don’t want to be forgotten from this world. Nobody wants to be...

But sadly there’s no place for them in our world. Except in a graveyard, or a cemetery…

And that is why; I go there to visit them; Early in the mornings or sometimes late at night… And spend some of my best moments in the company of dead.