Kicking rocks back and forth on cemetery grounds,
Laughing at the headstone inscriptions as we pass each one
Words written to sound like legacies scattered around this ghost town
Prophecies they all claim they couldn't have possibly outrun
Here lies a lesson they must have seen, yet failed to steer their course of fate
Before the Grim Reaper's annual call, an April debt none can debate -
These tragic fatalities live a million miles from your starry, untouchable estate
And I run so hard to catch up with you that I momentarily forget the peril at the gate
Tossing a baseball between our gloves, it's an unseasonably quiet evening
Joking until our stomachs hurt while the sun begins to set
Proclaiming how wise each of us are to have avoided Hades' acts of deceiving
So much so, that to no one at all, we wager quite the bet
I boast I'd have seen that ending coming,
And when I had, I wouldn't have stuck around
We shake hands and you agree that you'd have hit the ground running
This blanket gamble so remarkable, so uniquely profound
Visitors come and go, placing flowers on tombstones
It never fails that a look of bewilderment is cast this way
Odd how these visitors only ever visit alone
And just as quickly, they depart, the smoke still floating from their ashtrays
What poor souls all these phantoms are,
You say it's a shame they never knew the beauty of a Kilonova
They never experienced the rarity it is to be a neutron star -
Not a spirit explosive enough to leave behind such a supernova
Passing time in the graveyard,
What better way to spend every day?
I passively notice how my body becomes lined with scars -
The extra skin that once softened my bones begins to decay
Stay up until the hours of dawn playing games of guess who,
What shadow brought in will have a memorial next?
These endings I'm so confused that they chose to pursue -
The writing on the wall was there for so long, the signs so unperplexed
We don't weep for the dearly departed, their casualty an "I told you so"
I know none of these visitors get the inside joke,
After all, isn't it only funny because no one else knows?
Like nothing I've ever felt before, I say, as I take another hit - only my thousandth toke
Not a grandfather clock in sight, it takes away from the mystery
No reason I'd need it anyways
Haven't looked at the time since I arrived to this plot of history
The years spinning around the sun feel as short as winter days
Then like an epiphany in the night, I looked up to see familiar faces
The usual visiting hours but I'd know this lot anywhere
To reach me, they'd need an uncharted map measuring directions, mapping paces
For all that I see are my most dearly beloved, dressed in all black for a bleak affair
So I pick up the pace and sprint through these cemetery plots,
Barely registering the words said over the microphone in the distance
My palms are sweaty and my stomach is in knots,
I call out to my companion of graveyard existence
We hide in the trees, there's no way they'd find us here
Build a fort full of passwords no one else can decode
But as I sit in this embrace, I can't shake my growing sense of impending fear
That the tree on which I sit has decaying roots, a foundation beginning to corrode
Then above the tree line, I can hear them say
If you'd like to know what happened - come one, come all
For here is what we lay to rest today,
A withered skeleton who couldn't fight the symptoms of withdrawal
We so wish we could have prevented this,
But it can become difficult to help those who are stuck in their ways
So we'll send her off with a sympathetic kiss,
Concluding with a toast - your glasses, could you raise?
Here lies the spirit of such a beautiful tragedy,
We'll surely miss you so
Refusing the cure to an ever-present malady,
Had you taken it, you wouldn't have to go
I climb down from this tree fortress, ready to debate with the first person I see
Passing tombstone after another,
Then I slow down to realize one I'd never noticed before in all this debris
Too busy spending most days inhaling the black smoke of self-induced suffer
The ghosts, all this time, I thought had been burned by something less -
At least, isn't that what we spent so much time agreeing upon?
That we'd each avoid their fates without worry or stress,
But I see now it requires more than just the wave of a mental wand
I stare in horror at the face that mirrors mine, this very headstone,
Clutching onto my valuables I've defended so intensely that no one else seemed to understand
The flowers in my hair now wilted - with weeds my soul is overgrown
A secret dragging me under the waves, my body now too fragile to withstand
Spent all this time in the cemetery only to prolong,
A disease that had already been diagnosed
For written before my eyes all along,
Was the eulogy of my very own living ghost