Cemeteries

I saw three cemeteries today, from my passenger seat’s window view on my trip from Hanoi to Hue.

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I was reading my book and decided to take a break from words when I looked up, out from the window and a small local cemetery came into view. March snow still covered most of it, glittering under the shy afternoon sunlight. The tombstones stood close together, scattered. I had not expected to find a cemetery. I had also not expected to love it immediately.

Someone was playing music loudly next to my car, and I could see the tombstones were dancing with the music, their heads tilting backwards and forwards, rising up and down in their various shapes and sizes, catching the light at different angles. How fun! I pictured them there, the dead, their voices rising like steam. I imagined them as ghosts hanging out together and having parties and sleepovers everyday, laughing and talking and gossiping about their children and grandchildren’s poor choices and how the world keeps getting more fucked up. The thought brought a smile to my face, oh how sweet and silly it is.

My grandpa used to have his own little cemetery in his backyard, for his fishes. He kept ten koi in a tank four meters wide and one meter deep. One month he went on a trip—a rare thing, to see him lift his feet out of the little village he'd spent his whole life in. The kids had pestered him so relentlessly he had no choice but to go, they said he needed fresh air. But fresh air, he said, what do you need to go anywhere for that. Every morning he was out in the fields by five, sitting in meditation with the mist and the wind, lungs full of perfectly good air. But they packed his loud floral shirts anyway—green, red, lizard-print—into an old leather bag and hauled him up to Sapa for three days before they let it go. Up there, he said, the mist is no different from the mist I breathe in the fields. But he was pleased with himself all the same, wearing his sunglasses—the ones normally only the villagers had the privilege of seeing him put on—not caring that his already fog-blurred vision was now even more fog-blurred.

My grandpa came home to seven of his fish dead. Stone dead, bellies up. His wife had forgotten to turn on the air filter for just one day, and the giant fish couldn't last long in that little tank dug into the corner of the yard. He lifted each one gently and buried them under the mango tree. Every summer when I came to visit during school break, my grandpa and I would hold a secret ceremony exactly on the night of June 30th, always one of the hottest summer nights, to honor and remember the fishes. He would wear one of his floral shirts and sometimes, even his sunglasses.

They’re having the most fun here right now. Here, where? Here, right here, under the mango tree. What are they doing there? They’re swimming together, they’re laughing and swimming and are together.

And so are the people. They’re dead but they are together, in that same snowy cemetery. Their decaying physical bodies lie close to each other, closer than they would have allowed in life, all that careful keeping of distance collapsed now into the only intimacy that needs no permission. Why did I not know sooner? Death feels, at that moment, so not lonely.

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I was so pleased and entrenched in the sunset that the view of the second cemetery slid in my consciousness pleasantly. The tombstones in this one are neatly placed in rows and columns, with little to no snow covering it—clearly well tended. Every stone stands at the same height, about belly-level. The sunlight was so milky warm it laid itself over everything like the thinnest coat of honey and ginger powder. The trees, stripped of leaves and showing only bare branches, still looked so orangey and lively with a million tiny bony hands reaching upward to the sky, as if there's a cult organization here and the trees are the leaders guiding their members in the process of trying to reach for something unreachable.

I laughed at myself. What even is unreachable to the dead? Maybe they would want to be alive again, but being alive would not count as unreachable, since they must have already done it. To be dead, you would have to be alive first.

That train of thought opened into something else: Oh, I would love to live next to a cemetery, full of deaths thus full of aliveness. What a better way to wake up everyday and have deaths beside my window to tug at my silly little brain. On the good days, it would remind me that everything I've been too afraid to reach for is smaller than death itself. On the bad days, it would remind me that the things I've been chasing that aren't mine—aren't me—are smaller than that too. What a way to measure a life. Time is just a concept but death is real and so is being alive, here, in this moment.

I’d love to visit the graves on a nice sunny day, sit among the stones, learn their names and tell them about my ordinary hours—what I ate, what troubled me, what shamed me, what brought me joy, what made my life meaningful. Maybe a granny ghost would smack the shit out of me if I tell her I haven’t called mom in a month. Maybe they would clap for me through the little tiny hand-like branches in the trees that sit among them when I tell them about my achievements and pride. And maybe, most probably, they would shut out all the crap noises outside of me and get me to really focus on things that matter: because I only have a life to live.

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My partner woke me up when the sky was already full dark and I could faintly see the moon shining through clouds. Babe look, there, look over there. You see? These gals are fucking each other. Right next to that tombstone. They’re fucking fucking.

Oh my god, of course people would have sex in the cemetery. We laughed so hard we bursted in tears. I could see one’s leg wrapped up around the other’s waist, their back leaning on the big cross on the tombstone. The two looked so small and cartoony with their rhythmic movements. The cemetery is dark, quiet, and certainly, kind of scary. But those two certainly didn’t care. Right, what a way to forget about death and live in the moment—fucking. I had spent two hundred miles asking myself what it felt like to be alive, and here was the crudest answer the world had given me all day: two humans, a dark field, a cross for a backrest. My grandpa would have appreciated the economy of it.

I lowered the window shield and the night breeze touched my skin lightly. I tried to inhale but the cemetery smelled of nothing, as if it had already surrendered everything back to the earth, the rot, the flowers, the grief, and had come out the other side into pure air. Two people had sex on the tombstone and honestly, I wrote in my notebook: same, my handwriting shrivelling from the road’s roughness.

If my grandpa were here, he would probably even whistle at them until they awkwardly put on their clothes and enjoy himself a full hearty laugh. He always made fun of everything, taking nothing seriously. When he found his fish dead, he buried them and told everyone that the fish chose to die because they hated the alcohol that sometimes he poured down the tank after dinner, to share with them some fun of life, so they escaped him on days he was not home. When he found his wife's breathless body, he buried her and told his grandkids that she was the sleeping beauty but he, unfortunately, wasn’t the prince that could wake her. He said it like a joke. He said everything like a joke. But he was a small man, my grandpa. The size of someone who let the mist fill him each morning instead of going anywhere, who understood that the body knows what it needs and that what it needs is almost always something close, something already at hand. The size of someone who buried things under mango trees, held secret ceremonies in floral shirts, fed his fish some of his dinner's alcohol.

Under my grandpa’s mango tree buried not only the 7 koi fishes but also much more. I think I also buried some of my stuff there, my hairless naked dolls, my elementary school certificate for excellent students, and my cat (which was technically my grandparents’ cat) when it died one day from diarrhea. Grandpa always told me to bury only things that are meaningful to me, so I did. Because cemetery is for the ones once loved.

But where do you bury memories and laughs and tears? Where do you bury the banana snail soup he made every summer I came to visit—the smell of it something I've never been able to locate anywhere else? Where do you bury the ceremonies in floral shirts, the fog-blurred sunglasses, the voice that said: they're swimming, they're laughing, together? How do you bury the milky gingerish clouds from this morning, already gone? How do you plant a mango tree inside yourself—one that doesn't just hold what you’ve lost, but turns it, the way trees do, into something that gives shade?

Can I still reach for you, after I’ve buried you?

I reached my hand over and touched my partner whose hand was on the lever. Her hand is always cold, even when sweating. I tucked my index finger over her pinky, lightly tugging it, and felt the whole being of me. I only have a life to live, and I am in it, here, in this car, with her. She turned over to me and smiled, asking if I wanted to rest a bit more or to eat something. I wanted to kiss her so bad. But she was driving, and so I said: What do you think about living next to a cemetery?