Peace

Peace is a little found commodity. Something that can no longer be bought from a dispensary. Humanity now barred from the potential of pure peace doesn’t sit well. The anxiety not knowing when or how death shall come seeps into the air. Instead of dwelling on the grey nearing death, they fixate on coloring their lives with how much they can do in their years. How many places can they live? How many people can they know? Their sense of self directly related to how many names and numbers are stored in electronic directories. Screens and projections full of relationships they are supposed to bring color and vibrancy to a life that is mostly spent behind doors, locked away from sunlight and natural colors. It’s a physical thrum constantly buzzing through air ways and to-connected bodies.

Perhaps that thrum is why those with the warmth of life in their veins orbit around graveyards. A murky fascination and obsession for those lacking. The sight of empty abysses filled with bodies, set with guards that don’t blink or sleep embody the dread and the destination.

While the world fell to pieces the graves remained, like the teeth of grinning skulls in catacombs. The angels shrouding black marble mausoleums in an imagined decorum the living thought necessary for the dead. Those, still warm, stare at angelic guards keeping you out of already filled spaces. Their duty is to the dead, not the living, and I am their keeper, their judge, their placement giver.

“The warm ones are here again. The ones for whom time winds tighter than our own. Whose age is shone in indentations and discolorations, so different from us, yet so much the same. The cold ones, we move rarely and age in opposition. Our bodies once painted vibrant sky colors and details defined by crows’ feet and fabric pleats have been stripped by rain, wind, and the bleaching sun. Made smooth, angelic, any flaw now seen through rose colored glasses and called perfection. Lost arms to the war of time are “artistic choices”, scars of years traveled, worn smooth by water. “It’s natures choice.” The warm ones say, but we are the ones with open wounds and no blood to spill. The keeper calls it retribution. But I don’t remember for what”

I have kept the peace of graveyards long after all my family stopped. Fighting for peace far more often then I used to. My domain is less assaulting than the cacophony that surrounds my graveyards. Sky high cities crafted to look like the trees long-abandoned for other more immediate things. The yellow green of algae blooms cover every still water surface. There is no more still water that reflects the sky- the living need to breath and algae grows faster than trees, but the pastel hues seek to swallow up the world. There are no more autumns. No leaves to turn red, orange and gold- except here. In the grave yard, where people are too scared to enter, but too superstitious to avoid. The stillness when they enter seeks to stop their hearts and unclosing eyes watch them from every angle. They have long forgot the visits they feel obliged to make are not for their deceased, but for me.

Once they brought garish yellow monsters that killed my vibrant green graves. They trampled my Eden to take my trees, my color, my shade. They now know why it’s a sin to disturb graves. I took those lives into my peace, long before they were meant to be there. The monsters are covered in crimson ivy that covers every tarnished gear and rusted spring. I placed long dead warriors as warning to any who would try again. They seek no longer to disturb my peace. I stopped their pulling up of trees and cementing over my green, all fountains burble to keep away algae, and I wait- because every living being returns to me.

“I know not who I weep for. I know not how long I have been here. I have seen my hands covered in snow and listened as my surface grit crackled in the heat. I’ve seen flowers laid at my feet for the companion they mourn. They don’t know he was long removed. His stone body now stands over someone else’s empty grave. I have seen seasons pass as the two of us exist without company. When the people, who remember the dead, die themselves I am the one who keeps them company as the flesh gets eaten by worms and dirt and time. Then they too are gone. I stand resolute. Mourning for a body that isn’t there anymore. Or maybe I am mourning for myself, for a fate set by someone else, that I be left alone with only the dead. A void of eternal painted tears and no conversation.”

I made the statues. Froze them in a moment of despair. Never to be unfrozen. They chose their fate, pulling stones and ore from the depths of my family’s earth. The compressed bodies of those long dead. They burned the oil of my life-blood, sending concentrated specks into the very air they breathe. They brought me into their lungs. Allowed small bits of grit, marble, ashy smoke to spread across bronchial tubes into blood streams. In the pursuit of bigger buildings and more distortion, I have caught rides on their body’s public transportation and settled into deep layers of skin. Now, I simply have to wait. Skin will peel and you will see. I’ve been here all along. I know how much time I must wait to have the pieces of myself back. I watch as you make your obligatory visits to my gates across my greens. I know how much stone is in you. I also see those who seem to shed their shackles. Their lives a slow spread of stone. The call of my peace not as potent because they have managed to retain their own. They are not festering with the longing that ties everyone’s fates together, leading them back to my waiting earth and arms. Soon everyone will join the city of statues. Replace the one of flesh, all return to the grinning skulls in graveyards. The living visit those who passed before them, but the living don’t realize the ones they are visiting aren’t in the graves.

No one quite remembers. Burial allows the stone to shed the flesh and I dig them up, paint them, pose them. Place them where they might watch the world forget about them. There is no peace anymore. Stone judges much harsher than flesh…because what else do they have to do until they erode away.

The one thing I haven’t answered yet is… if a statue was once human, does it still breathe?