I do not visit my fathers ashes. I have yet to visit the wall they are placed behind. I hate the bleakness of that place. I hate the dark nostalgia that encompasses it. That place has an repugnant power. The power to condense the entirety of a father an son into a single metaphor: a wall.

I went to the cemetery today with the the intention to visit the wall and confront my cognitive dissonance. As if this morning my own obsessive fear and discomfort of mortality invited the memories of my childhood to a romantic dinner for two. My future was flirting with my past.

I walked out into the green field and kneeled down by an old bench with a small eulogy engraved to a small child. The humor wasnt lost on me since I felt as if I came here to lay my inner child to rest. I stared off for a moment at the tombstones resembling stalagmites rising up from the earth and the dark storm clouds resembled a giant, abrasive paw. A paw eternally raking ethereal dirt over these graves.

I look at the old, delapitated houses around the border of the cemetary and found it comfortably symbolic; The body is a suitable home temporarily and when its occupant moves on, the house still stands ground and slowly crumbles. Giving it a sort of charming character in the most morbid, decrepid sense. The brick foundation of the skin and the old rotten wood cabinets of the torso and lonely, abandoned furniture of the internal organs. I soon felt that this is not a graveyard, this is an abandoned neighborhood. With strict deed restrictions against the still occupied houses such as my own. My fathers house stood up around a small concrete walkway down a small set of stairs by the water and it had burnt down a few years back. My father died with no money and although cremation was highly against his beliefs, the state imposed arson as a way to get him into this neighborhood in accordance to the eternal lease. They let him move in, under the condition that his house shall be burnt down and its embers should be placed in a wall. Just as physical as it is metaphorical, this wall is an obtrusive eyesore in an otherwise decent, low key neighborhood. This wall represents the lower class. This wall represents the low income housing of the graveyard. The less fortunate. Ill forever hate that wall and I couldnt bear to stand infront of and accept the role of an lowly worm trying to scale a monolith.

The poet Khalil Gibran wrote: “A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, “I will have a camel for lunch today.” And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again-and he said, “A mouse will do.”

Today I am the fox and at sunrise this morning, my fathers ashes were a camel I realized as I turned to head home. At noon I settled for the mouse of merely stolling through that old abandoned neighborhood.. I still have not visted my fathers ashes.