An Ode to Sunbathing in the Cemetery (in honour of spooky season)
I came to sunbathe with the corpses. To take communion amid the warmth and rot. To surrender to the sanctity and silence of a sun-soaked séance, suspending myself in the liminal space between here and gone. The dead don’t mind. They were once warm too, with eyes that flickered and drank the sun. I lay my blanket between two headstones—Beloved Mother, and Gone But Not Forgotten—and unbutton my dress like a sacrament. The sun extends its rays and finds me. Finds the soft parts. Finds the grief curled up behind my clavicle like a quivering, soft-bellied prey, and kisses it until it stops twitching.
I offer my body to the Earth. Grass presses against my back like a thousand quiet hands. Bees hum elegies. A crow heckles me from a weepy oak. I raise my sunglasses and wink. I am not here to mourn; I am here to remember. To bronze my skin with the residue of love and loss. To feel something, anything at all---down to the marrow. To remind myself I hold decay in my palm the same way others hold a bouquet of flowers.
Someone—probably in pew or pulpit—would say this is wrong. But I am here, and the sky is here, and my body—this exhausted cathedral—is still breathing. The tombstones don’t flinch. They’ve seen everything. They understand that worship isn’t always on your knees. Sometimes it’s just about remembering your aliveness in the presence of those who are no longer.
In the distance, I spot a freshly dug grave alongside a row of headstones bearing the same family name. I gaze at the forgotten, crumbling markers standing wearily amid others carved from the finest marble. I wonder what their legacies were. Time erases everything. People always forget. I turn my attention towards the solemn monuments still tended to by the shaking hands of grief and love. I think of the bodies slowly dissolving into the Earth beneath the votive offerings and vases of flowers. People never let go. I breathe in the scent of soil, gardenias, and rusted brass—growing slightly resentful that we waste space even in death, and that, for some reason, our loved ones make shrines for us instead of letting us find our way to the next incarnation unburdened.
As for me? All I possess is a beating heart—tender, bloodied, and raw—to leave as a grave offering. Maybe that’s enough, I think. I eat a peach, juices dribbling down my chin. I sweat. I cry just a little. A breeze lifts my hair like fingers that once held me. And for a moment—just a moment—this macabre picnic of skin and sorrow feels like a resurrection.
Life is a beautiful, rotten thing. And I am proof of that. I’m still here. The sun still looks for me. Just ask the departed.
Well, you could… but they probably wouldn’t answer.
