Digging It Up

Dirt flies up into the moonlight as you bend over the grave, morbid confetti falling back into the sheet of your hair. You blow it away and keep digging.

Finally, the shovel hits wood. Not just wood, mahogany. You spared no expense for her.

Juliette Windsor. You had the name carved in pretty black calligraphy above the simple word: beloved. She is not friend or family, but some combination of everything. She is the first girl you ever loved.

You brush dirt off the casket and reach for the lid. It groans open easily; the hinges are used to parting for you on nights like these when the moon is full and pockmarked with tears.

A drop falls down your face and into the casket as you behold your love. She is held together by the skeleton of memories and the salt from your tears. It is always easiest to start from the bottom and work your way up.

There, at her feet, is the nail polish she used to apply religiously every Sunday of sixth grade so that each week would have a fresh coat—both fingers and toes. It is a deep pink that could almost pass for red. You used to stare at that polish across classrooms and cafeterias before you even really knew her. You felt the red-pink pounding in your pulse points: wrist, neck, temple. It was almost the same color as her blood the day she faceplanted on the blacktop. A gash opened up on her chin and the teacher ordered you to take her to the nurse. Juliette begged you not to, and your heart was pounding too fast for logic, so instead you spent twenty minutes in the bathroom holding a soggy paper towel to her face.

There are also the little black wedge sandals she wore every Wednesday, the same ones responsible for the gym accident even though the teacher docked her points for inappropriate footwear.

That day in the bathroom, she smiled past the bloody towel, a trembling thing that sent shivers down your spine. You became friends without even trying.

You are cold now, in the graveyard, even with the August moon warm on your calves.

Juliette always said her legs were her best feature. She wore pencil skirts in the height of January and it was then that you understood what it meant to look at someone. You can see the red-and-black plaid and the way it flared over her soft skin, smooth with the traces of strawberry-peach shaving cream.

You saw the bottle once, when you were in her bathroom in eighth grade, and you stuck your face up against the nozzle like you could inhale her scent into your bloodstream.

Her thighs are the place you perched with a cup of vanilla ice cream, on the picnic table outside because there weren’t enough seats. You smeared a dollop with rainbow sprinkles on her nose and instead of laughing, she just stared. It was tenth grade and the first time her cheeks colored pink like that long-forgotten nail polish.

On her index finger you can see the metal ring stamped with butterflies that she won at the boardwalk and never took off; the one that pressed cool against your knuckle the first time she held your hand.

Her arms wrapped hand-knitted blankets over your shoulders at night when college applications became too much. You would sleep over because no one knew what she was to you and in the morning your fingers would be fisted in her oversized gray t-shirt.

Her neck was your favorite place to kiss, right above the tiny silver chain that held a J charm over her throat. You could feel the metal links move when she breathed and it was glorious.

Her face is the one thing you cannot recall with perfect clarity, and it is a special type of cruel. You remember the exact brand of vanilla chapstick she used but not the way her lips bowed when she applied it in the rearview mirror. The first time you kissed her was under a full moon and all you have left is the taste, burning the roof of your mouth.

You know that she had freckles across her cheekbones, but you have lost the exact patterns you traced in the dark of your bedroom.

You know that there were tears—so, so many—the day after graduation when she decided to leave. She was going to college, and what was the point of staying together through the summer? She said you wanted different things, but how could that be possible when all you wanted was her? It is that distorted, wet, devastated face you see in your memory and it’s the worst kind of torture.

You buried her after she drove off in that terrible, peeling red Toyota Camry. The brakes squealed as she turned the corner away from you, and it was the last time you ever saw her.

You took the pieces of her to this graveyard and buried her to try to forget, to mourn, to move on. But it has been two months and you still cannot stop yourself from coming here every full moon to dig her back up and bare her to the world once more.

“Oh my god.”

You hear that voice in your dreams—in your nightmares—in the hollow part of your chest that screams open in the moonlight.

You whirl around, and there she is.

She is so, so pale in the moon’s glow and you think at first she is a phantom summoned by your desperate subconscious. But then you recognize disgust leaching the color from her face.

“I didn’t believe it, when the cemetery called,” she says.

You turn around once more and see the night watchman pointing his flashlight in your direction. You thought you’d been careful to sneak around him, but he must have seen you one too many times with your head bent over the grave and a shovel in your hand.

“I—how—” You have thought so many times about what you would say to her if you had another chance, but now it’s all shredded through and ruined.

“You’re lucky they didn’t call the cops! This is sick.” Juliette starts pacing, a hand on her forehead. “Actually, do you know what happened?” She stops to face you and that is so much worse, having to wilt under the anger and pity in her expression.

“They called my mom, told her someone was tampering with her daughter’s grave. Imagine her shock when she found out I was dead.” Sarcasm drips from those lips you couldn’t remember the shape of, and you suddenly think that was much kinder than being confronted with the horrible twist of them now.

There is nothing you could possibly say to fix this situation.

Juliette stares at your stricken expression and scowls. She shoves past you and it is nothing like the soft way her skin used to brush yours under the covers.

“What did you even bury?” She peers into the grave and recoils.

For the first time, you see what she sees. A bottle of red-pink nail polish, crusted around the edges. A pair of black sandals with faded straps. A plaid pencil skirt and a gray t-shirt laid out in the shape of a body; the J necklace resting against the fabric and the butterfly ring where her index finger would have been. Folded along the side of the casket, a knitted blanket that’s starting to fray. A melted tube of vanilla chapstick and a rusted can of strawberry-peach shaving cream. You realize there is mold growing around the old plastic cup that once held ice cream.

You are so deeply ashamed, of this collection of rotten memories that you buried and still cannot let go of.

When Juliette turns around, you are crying, but she doesn’t care. She can’t even look at you and you think you deserve it.

She takes a lighter out of her pocket and flicks it on. There is no hesitation, the flame lighting the steel in her eyes as she drops it into the casket.

The fire catches on her shirt first—the left panel where her heart would be—and slowly spreads to the rest.

You whimper. The licking flames cover and distort her name carved into the granite headstone.

“I’m sorry,” Juliette says. “But I no longer exist in your world.”

You try to explain that that’s what you were doing all along; trying to detach and bury and turn her into a ghost so that maybe you could believe she would never come back. So that maybe you wouldn’t spend a lifetime thinking about what you’d lost.

But Juliette turns on her heel and tromps off across the cemetery, and before you can say anything, she is gone.

You turn back to the fire raging in the grave. Heat presses against your eyes and makes them water. You stand there, silent. Watching as the time capsule of love melts to nothing.

What she will never understand is how much harder it is to burn someone from your memory.