I bent down over my daughters’ grave and placed my hands on their stone warmed by afternoon sun. For a moment I stayed there, kneeling on the damp ground, resting my hands on the rose-speckled granite, letting the letters of their names and the numbers of their dates press into my palms again. A strange habit from the first year after they died, when I came here often, to remember they were real and so was my grief, so was my love.
(When you are one who adores cemeteries—or more importantly, adores the ones beneath the ground—you do not mind looking odd. If anyone else is around and happens to notice, you simply nod to each other in that sacred, silent acknowledgement of fellow grievers and carry on. Cemeteries are one of the last spaces where you are allowed to be strange without question.)
But suddenly everything shifted, shimmered, shuddered.