Reunion beyond death
Since you have discovered the cemetery, you must already be somewhat familiar with these places. How did you cross the forest? It seems you managed to cross it. How did you find this place? It seems you managed that as well. Because you were determined.
I cannot call it courage—that would sound too “virtuous.” But you certainly trusted yourself. Even if you did not fully believe in your own essence, you trusted it nonetheless.
As you have surely realized, this is not an easy place. There is endless fog here. Most amateurs vanish in it. Yet is it not insecurity that is truly safe? Is it not what forces you beyond your boundaries? It is because of that uncertainty that you are here now, reading these words.
Perhaps you thought they came from your mother. Yes, I left this note on your mother’s gravestone—but I wrote it. Since ghosts do not exist, I do not suppose she sees this. Yet I am certain that she always sees you, or rather, through you.
Perhaps even now you imagine her still stroking your hair, her advice never sounding pedantic. The way she always cared for you, and yet, in her mind, was always in distant lands—because she imagined entire worlds for you.
It could hardly be said that you truly “loved” her, I suppose. Yet you were certainly bound to her, and that is always more valuable than love. Relationships founded on love often ends when love fades, but relationships founded on devotion itself—no matter how painful or turbulent they become—do not end as long as that devotion remains.
That is why yours never ended.
You are reading this in her voice—I know that—because she has seeped into you. Did you not come into existence from her body? If so, then she lives within your body: in the breath you draw, in the beating of your heart. Because you are her, and she is you.
Then who lies in the cemetery?
I knew her, even though we never spoke.
She wandered around here often. She had grown attached to this place. Whenever the city wearied her, she would escape into the forest, and I would watch her from the tower on the hill.
There was something almost enchanted about her manner. She spoke constantly to herself, as though others were beside her—even though no one was there. Were they the trees she spoke with? No. Perhaps things we cannot see. Things belonging entirely to her own world.
I never interfered with her. I wanted her to live freely within that relationship. Instead, I admired her from afar—her strange ability to reshape reality itself, the way a sculptor reshapes stone.
But later I realized something.
She was ill.
I do not wish to call her mad. She was physically ill. I did not know what afflicted her, but eventually I could no longer ignore certain behaviors that repeated themselves. Sometimes she would fall into something like a trance, and I would become too afraid even to look.
Yet I could not descend into the city. If I did, I knew they would imprison me for reasons connected to my past. Because of that, I could not bring her medicine or any help from the city.
But she seemed to have found her own remedy already: herself.
A few days before I left this note, your mother died—not in agony, but in quiet serenity.
I buried her. With my own hands.
I bury everyone who dies in this forest—animals as well. Many of the graves here belong to wolves and foxes, because humans rarely come to this place. Yet your mother did.
I placed her gently into her coffin and covered the grave with earth.
Yet I did not even know her name.
If she had truly been alone, I might never have known it. But I sensed that she had a child. She was too maternal. At times she would stroke even the leaves with affection. Such tenderness does not appear from nothing; it is shaped by motherhood.
So I thought her child might one day come here—if they knew their mother liked to spend time in such desolate places.
That is why I left this note upon the gravestone.
If you are reading it, you should know this: this cemetery will take care of the body.
If you wish, you may take it and carry it away. There are shovels behind the abandoned cemetery building. She is entirely yours.
If you do not wish to, you may come and visit her grave whenever you like. But you must not believe that the corpse in the coffin is still your mother. That was only the form she had before she became you. So do not mourn her… or mourn, if you must—but do not mourn as though you have lost her.
She once had her own name. But since she is now you, her name is no longer important. It would be fitting if you wrote your own name upon this gravestone—not as a sign of death, but as a reunion. You were separated from her by being born, and through death she has now mingled with you again.
Know the value of that.
And who am I, then? Am I still watching you now from that tower on the hill just as I watched your mother, or have I already begun fleeing into the distance so you cannot catch me? Probably. But this is no game. I am merely another ghost, burying other ghosts in a forgotten cemetery…
A.