My first two years out of college, I lived next to a graveyard. It was something I mentioned often, something I proffered to strangers at parties when I couldn’t remember anything else about myself. Grew up in Michigan, works in marketing, lives next to a graveyard—I repeated it like a teenager outside a club, fastidious about the details of their fake ID.

To be clear, the Histon Road Cemetery was no patch of grass but rather a kind of suburban necropolis, boasting its own subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, the stones in neat rows in their plots, upright and expectant like the backs of chairs in a vast auditorium. The real estate agent was quick to insist on its innocuousness, as if it, not the metallic condominium in which we were standing, was the eyesore. As far as I could see, the cemetery was a selling point. I was hoping it would define me in the way I hoped everything would define me—that is, by sheer proximity. You have to understand that if you had looked inside of me then you would have found a big, black hole. I had no choice but to look outwards.

When I was twelve, a drama teacher told my mother there was something deep about me. This was right, I thought, but also very wrong. I knew the dark depths of myself, yes, and I knew the bright surface on which the sunlight danced, but I wasn’t sure there was anything in between. Other people seemed to be filled with something. What was it? And how could I get it?

My roommate, Emma, who shared none of my concerns about proximity but was fairly deep in debt, was eager to take the deal. We settled nicely into our little box. We knew no one around but each other. If you looked out my bedroom window, all you saw was headstones. “Goodnight, dead people!” my boyfriend called out, hitting the light switch, when he first came to visit. He broke up with me a week after I moved in. Or I broke up with him. Or we came to an agreement.

It was not merely my backyard, I soon found, but my valve to the rest of the world, always offering a shortcut, no matter the destination. Only the dry cleaner and the auto body shop were in the opposite direction. In other words, anywhere you wanted to go was on the other side of the graveyard.

I passed through so often, I had come to recognize the names on the more ostentatious (by this I mean Catholic) headstones, those Rock of Ages monuments of a granite Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, or of Saint Anthony guarding the gates to heaven. They set their mythology in stone and I could admire that. “I’m passing Maisie Byrne!” I would text Emma, which roughly translated to I’ll be home in five.

A cemetery in the daylight is like any other place. You forget it’s a cemetery, then you remember, then you forget again. The cemetery was a popular bike and running route; the South Gate offered pamphlets marked please return after use, which provided a guide to the property’s trees along with a comprehensive history of every Beech and Birch and Juniper, making it a sought-after destination for old ladies and arboriculturalists. I took a pamphlet once and neither used nor returned it.

I didn’t pay much attention to the trees. All I really took the time to notice was that there were so many mothers and wives and sisters, so many fathers and husbands and brothers. And so many friends. But there were never any prepositions stuck on the end of those labels. They were a friend to everyone, is what I gathered.

And I hardly ever saw visitors. Once there was a mother and child, lingering dutifully on a simple, marble tombstone. But they didn’t linger all that long; they may have just been passing through. Even the flowers seemed wilted, overgrown, no longer an adornment to but rather part and parcel of the grave itself. All of which begged the question of whether there were really any people under those stones, if it was all artifice, like a permanent Halloween display. Meant to spook.

Then there was the occasional jarring dash, marking a life like a pause in speech. 1953 - 1954. It would make anyone’s heart sink. But if I was passing these numbers, I was on my way somewhere. I didn’t have time to cry over dead babies. Babies have been dying for all time and will continue to die for as long as they are born. I’m only going to live and die once.

I had always said I wanted to be cremated, returned to the soil and used to fertilize a tree or some crap like that, but now I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reintegrated into anything, to bear new life, to live on, in spectral form, forever. A part of me just wanted to be done when I was done, stowed away like all things whose use had been exhausted. Those names on the headstones knew what they were: dead, dead, dead. I thought often about death but very little about the dead, about what happened to them, about all of those people underground. Perhaps these two things had something to do with one other. I feared becoming what I saw as supremely irrelevant—something like that. As a kid, my little sister, fresh off a school trip to Ellis Island, drew a family tree in Sharpie on corrugated cardboard, which she then presented to my parents on Christmas. I remember staring at it in my reindeer pajamas. “Who are these people?” I said, accidentally aloud. I didn’t care. I opened my presents.

***

I was making extra cash working nights at a bar and didn’t usually get off until around 3:30. I lied to my parents, telling them I took an Uber home. What I wanted to say to them was that Uber wasn’t safe either, that you were getting in a car with a stranger, and now you didn’t even have your own two feet to run on.

I knew walking wasn’t safe, was objectively less safe than an Uber, but the simple truth is that there is no place on earth in which it is safe for a woman to walk alone at night. I won’t harp on this; I have accepted it and am not convinced there is any use begrudging it, seeing how unlikely it is to change. But some still seem, in insisting on the unsafety of certain streets and certain hours, to imply that there exists a time and place in which women have free rein. When I moved to St. Louis for college, for example, my father told me I would have to be careful walking at night, as if this designated it from any other place I—we—had ever lived. A rural country road might appear, in its pastoral quiet, divorced from the more depraved impulses of man, even from mankind altogether. But different darknesses merely pose different dangers, and of course it is these very roads from which so many women are abducted, cut into pieces, cannibalized, what have you. All of this is to say that I felt scared walking through the graveyard, but no more scared than I did walking anywhere else. If anything, I felt marginally safer. While the ambience was certainly fitting, the location certainly convenient for a murder, I figured this would just be too obvious, and any murderer worth his salt wouldn’t be so derivative.

The bar was tucked away on a street on which it always seemed to be raining. Its patrons were mostly college kids, and some hostile residents, and some older men there to watch the college kids. Gaggles of sophomore girls in identical black tops and wedged heels huddled around the counter, ordering vodka crans and vodka sprites and the lightest beer we had. I hated those girls because I remembered, so vividly, being one of them. There was a searching look in their eyes. They were looking for something, had lost something and hadn’t a clue where to find it. They were empty, too, but they didn’t know depths like I knew depths. I wanted to hug them and I wanted to throw them out the door by their glossy, pin-straight hair.

They knew what boys they wanted, and I watched them get them. All the rituals were so familiar to me. The brushing of hands, the mindless teasing, only one thing in mind: proximity. These things didn’t excite me anymore, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I had gained some kind of self-respect or because I had simply settled into my natural apathy towards life, sex at one time being the only thing that could draw me out of it but even that now proving insufficient. The point is, I was glad not to be implicated. I was glad to take their money. Besides, I was nice to them in a way I could only be to people I hated. I was nice with my whole heart; it wasn’t even about getting tips so much as it was about surviving, and the only way I knew how to survive in that bar was by summoning some profound empathy out of those dark depths, some endless wealth of goodwill that I couldn’t seem to conjure even around the people I loved. One time a man grabbed me by the ear to tell me not to ever take any shit. All I did was nod and reposition my hair and walk away. There was some study done proving that working nights could kill you. Give you cancer. Increase your chance of heart disease by some ungodly percent. It’s best not to read those studies. Walking, on the other hand, can add up to seven years to your life.

Some nights I was too tired to be scared. But others I was just alert enough. I looked for distractions. I wasn’t a nail-biter, but bit my nails in imitation of someone who was; I didn’t have any nervous habits of my own—even those I had to borrow. Ultimately, I couldn’t enjoy it with the same relish of those for whom it was truly thoughtless, compulsive. For me, it was always forced, an approximation of pleasure but never pleasure itself, just like sex. It was insufficient. My second attempt was to revert to the technique I had used as a child, which was to repeat the words this isn’t scary, this isn’t scary, this isn’t scary over and over and over again. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. A far more effective method, I found, was simply stressing yourself out, preoccupying yourself with the kinds of little worries that guaranteed to terrorize you for all eternity, thereby negating the possibility of death altogether. I started with cataloguing all of the unreturned emails in my inbox, then asking myself if I would ever get in the habit of washing the dishes right away, of making the small sacrifices necessary to lead a life free of muck. I then moved on to the question of whether my (ex)boyfriend remembered I existed, and whether it was really distance keeping us apart or something else, and whether that something else might be my propensity for my muck or my hollowness or the way I let fear grip me in random moments. Then I thought about the emails again.

I was contemplating how to address a superior when I suddenly knew that I was not alone, that further down the path there was a figure and it was advancing and then coming suddenly to a halt, feet planted, just standing and looking out. I didn’t imagine my guts in a trash can or anything like that, I simply felt life shoot through me, like the thrill of finally touching hands at a bar. It happens at bars too, on dates with nice guys—the cutting up, the cannibalizing.

There are moments of clarity. Those fated seven seconds when your life is meant to flash before your eyes. And orgasm, which rarely lasts that long. All I knew was I was afraid, was that I wanted a hand to hold that didn’t threat to clench into a fist.

The figure: I was staring up at it with eyes that could hardly see. I was processing everything in megapixels but as the image in front of me loaded with a delay, something was sketching itself into familiarity. The dancer’s posture, the vulpine features—

Emma. It was Emma. Or was it? No, yes, it was Emma. My Emma!

This realization didn’t ease my fear but instead cemented it, or distorted it, washed it over with new light, raised new questions. It was wrong. Like seeing your mother naked or something. Emma there in the graveyard could only indicate some kind of radical break in reality. She was going through a psychotic episode, or I was going through a psychotic episode, or we were both having a psychotic episode together. She was laughing, which was something she did often, which should not have been frightening, but it was. I didn’t know what the laughter meant. Everything had been emptied of meaning, and I didn’t know what cues to take from any of it, which I imagine is not dissimilar to the experience of being a baby. 1953-1954.

“What are you doing here,” I said, not a question but an accusation.

“Ice cream!” she said.

I stared at her and then she went on. She was running to the corner shop. She’d had a sudden hankering for Phish Food.

I could recognize her expressions again, understand what it was she was referring to when she said words like “corner shop” and “Phish Food.” They were not ciphers for something sinister, not empty syllables, but the things themselves. I could recall the streaks of marshmallow in the chocolate. I could see my bedroom window, the lamp on. Emma was pulling her hood back up over her head and we were heading our separate ways. I loved her so dearly. She was a friend, not just to anyone but to me.

“See ya at home!” she called out, unaware she was uttering my favorite phrase in the English language. Can’t you see her saying it? Her hand mid-wave, her face bright as it looked over her shoulder. She was poised like a ballerina about to launch into a pirouette, one foot stepping away and one still planted in the copper-colored dirt. This is how it is always spoken—at crossroads. It is the only goodbye that sounds like a hello. It rings with the reunion it anticipates, with the many hundreds, even thousands of reunions it anticipates. It isn’t merely consolation. It isn’t whatever bullcrap this day brings, we’ll always have each other, but something better, something like I might just go out and have the best day of my life today and hey, when it’s done you’re the one who will hear all about it, who will see me in my slippers, who will boil the water while I chop the onions.

I repeated it back to her, likewise bright and waving, and then felt suddenly that I had been rude, our nonchalance with the quotidian matters of life like an affront to the dead.