I drive along the bay into suburbs I once knew and pass a sad, forgotten place. I park and walk settling into the reverent ambiance, looking for letters and numbers. It is 34 years since I stepped on this grass. Finally I find Lawn D, Row F of the Cemetery.
The numbers are not logical, I wander back and forth looking down, counting, confused and then there, in front of me he lies; decayed bones now. My tears surprise me.
I place a small white rose beside the plaque submerged in healthy grass, and wonder if the white rose bush his mother gave me, is still flowering in the garden of the home where we last made love.
I remember those photos that rested for years on bookcases. My first lover, blue-eyed and tall, with a mullet haircut, flared jeans and athletic body, laughed as he bent over a cricket bat. In another he stood shirtless, handsome, happy, that first summer up in the Victorian high country. Now snatches of memory remain, my heart is soft.
I listen to the swish of tyres on the wet road outside the wire fence and remember his funeral day. I thought his grave was on a slight hill, but it is flat. Then the cemetery seemed empty, now there seems to be no room for another body. It felt desolate, forlorn; today it is strangely peaceful.
Visitors wander quietly, some with bunches of flowers; I look up and we smile gently as we pass. It is a hello-goodbye place.
Soon after visiting his grave, I drive southeast towards Wilson’s Promontory National Park. There is no white roadside cross with flowers; it was a time before those memorials appeared and became a reminder to slow down, a reminder to love. Which two trees did he hit with the cry of screeching metal?
At his December funeral, the priest to my horror said he was a Christmas Present for Jesus! A few weeks later his friends and I gathered at the Prom. We drank warm moselle flagon wine. I swallowed my sorrow, and numbed my longing for his strong arms around me, for his love.
Now I clamber over huge granite boulders. I don’t remember this rugged beauty, I only remember the lonely nights with friends, and faint light layered through bushy trees.
A ferocious sound plays through the treetops and below it brings gusts of grit. A eucalypt grimaces in the wind. Leaves lift and bow and expose their soft grey undersides, then right themselves before the next blast.
The southerly gale at the Prom is blowing questions back into me and through me. I knew all those years ago that I couldn’t live with those questions, I let them and my lingering guilt go. Now they are like ripples, not Victorian back-beach waves, full of kelp ready to wrap around my body and drown me. Just ripples, I don’t mind their presence. I feel held in this granite place.
Published in Grieve Volume 4 Hunter Writers Centre 2016
