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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.

The Ruined Castle

Updated: Nov 9, 2023

Dunluce Castle, Northern Ireland. Precariously perched atop basalt cliffs some 100 feet above the wild Atlantic. She sits soft but resilient, the wildness of her surroundings juxtaposed against the strategy of her placement.

To modern-day sightseers she is enigmatic and romantic. But historically, she was built with a pragmatic purpose: identify ships that may approach in the distance, maintain the natural advantage. Protect. Defend.

Parts of her have been eroded away by the passage of time. Entire walls have collapsed under tumultuous weather conditions only to be swallowed by the sea. She is ragged and beautiful, stunning and broken. Pictures will never do her justice.

Castles in ruins have always called to me. Sure they’re beautiful, but more than that, they make me feel. A heaviness mostly, and yet, one that I somehow embrace. Inside their walls I hear ancient tongues and echoes of warrior poets. Battles fought and won, lost and mourned for. I see the ghosts of men who hung in the gallows for crimes we wouldn’t blink an eye at today.

I feel the rushed palpitations of star-crossed lovers absconding from oppressively sealed fates in the dead of night. They never make it. They get caught in a storm and the boat overturns, their limbs bashed against the craggy rocks until the ocean engulfs them. An escape ungranted. A love uncharted. That’ll teach them for trying to be happy.

Happy endings are rare in places like these. We - and all the historians of our time - know this. But we're still intrigued just the same.

I suppose I like things that can fall to ruins but still hold on. Fragile but defiant. Tenacious reminders of how nothing can ever really be destroyed, even through force and time.

And there she remains. No longer impenetrable. Fortifications crumbling, left wild and unguarded. But I prefer her this way. She has so many stories to tell. Give me the grit and tragedy. Give me the overgrown foliage and the graves of the dead enshrined underneath. Give me bloody battles and warrior poets. Give me stories of risks taken for love — even when the ending doesn’t serve up a happily ever after.

Give me the ruined castle.

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