What Else Loss is Like

I once dreamed of a place where escalators are like rollercoasters, each with its own name. Each one ran to the rhythm of a different classical musical score with a full orchestra. It was gloriously excessive as a way to travel from one level to the next.
As a child I thought that graveyards were terrible places. To stand among all of those dead bodies was chilling. I imagined that the spirits of those people lingered there. And I imagined that they filled the place with their memories so beautiful, so gloriously excessive, that if one touched them, one would collapse of a broken heart.

I thought then that a graveyard was a trap of deadly sorrow from which you might never escape. Now, graveyards are places of cold stones (though there is still something surreal about knowing there are bodies all around). The only memories I find are those I bring with me. I unpack them for a while, and they accompany me when I leave. And when I leave, I know that graveyards are not filled with memories, but are empty of them.

I thought last night that I had not been entirely wrong as I child, only wrong about the place in which the devastatingly beautiful memories dwell. I thought I saw them wandering about on a path I once walked with vivaciousness in any kind of weather, a place where they were created, a place that now seems so haunted by those memories that I fear to walk it. But in the light of day I know it is not that the memories fill that path. It is that they fill me. The path just unpacks them, whether I want it to or not. But then I realize. I want it to. I do not want to lose a single one of them from neglect. I cannot wait to walk the dogs tonight in the gloriously excessive and devastatingly beautiful though I know how hard it will be.