D6 ★ { Orion Hartmyre } ★ DONE

All I've got to spend is time, the currency we all overlook until we're left coughing up our crimson-colored sorrows at the gates of bankruptcy. 

I'm rich in a sense, I suppose. Rich in companions with literal lifetimes of knowledge and wealthy in security knowing I'll never be subjected to the reckless abandon so many of the living belittle. As those that dance on hollowed ground quench the earth's thirst with their honeyed tears, I'm carving beds for my weary new neighbors to rest in the earth. I'm a king here. Adorned with the jeweled beads of toiled sweat and lavish soil and rings of stormy sapphires beneath my eyes. I'm waist deep in my castle walls, forged by dirt and beatless hearts and breathless lovers. 

I rather our father have abandon us. I rather he have left without a word or, even better, have said a goodbye so that a new chapter in the Hartmyre Family Horror Story could have came about. Instead, he thought it more merciful to rot in the yard and watch the weeds die than his children grow. He thought it better to decay before the faces of his young and expect them not to do the same, not to succumb to the whims of the venom unfairity of life. He thought it better to stand as a living reminder of how the depths of your breaths do not declare you as living. I say this, but I know that hollowed shadow puppet of what once was my father, out in the yard, eyes filled with nothing but the last door of his lifetime separating himself from our mother, has no thoughts at all. 

It's almost cruel. How far our father has sunk away, our mother more alive than he six feet beneath us.

To define our mother in matters of pulse was to spit on the face of an angel. An unforgivable insult. She is more alive than half of us would ever care to admit we aren't. She's alive in the constellations that freckle Florence's eyes and see beauty in the humble and overlooked. She's alive in in Teddy's hands; hands that only knew how to prepare and protect and create visions of virtue from nothing at all. Esther keeps our mother's flame lit, the scarlet fiery liveliness runs through her and keeps us all warm despite the mask of vaudeville darkness she presumes. Our mother is alive in Bea's heart, a pure estate fashioned from rash decisions and kindred passion. 

And little Clara is perhaps the only one  honoring our mother better than us all. Life is for the living, and Clara is paying homage to our mother's greatest gift whilst we mimic her smiles and pray for another day without falling apart.

But looking out at our phantom father, haunting the cemetery with breaths any number of those bodies beneath him would have paid an innumerable number to have made me come to the realization that all prayer gave me were a pair of idle hands and unanswered woes. So I picked up a shovel and answered them myself.

Day dreamers and grave makers walk hand in hand. There's a common misconception that we dig in retreat, to retract from the lonesome and the pain of the world above back into the loving earth. That we run amongst the trenches of the deceased to save our own hearts from the living evils, hiding in catacombs where the silence can drown out all that that didn't kill us but we surely wish it did. But they're wrong. They're wrong to thing we crack open our palms only to close our doors; that we tear down the earth only to put up walls. The truth is that there's a comfort in reminding yourself every day of your own damned mortality. The truth is that mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and lovers and adversaries and unrequited mourners all stop visiting one day, and the dead get lonely. The truth is that we have looked at hundreds of thousands of faces but never saw them. The truth is that there is some sort of a bittersweet song still left in the violet lips of the departed, fragments of a chorus or a bridge here and there that the entire yard seems to sing in an ethereal harmony on days when the sun doesn't scorch nor surrender. The truth is that gravediggers know, more than anyone else, that the richer you are, the more you have to lose. The truth is that we're not running away, but we're running to. The truth is that we're looking for something we don't believe we can find with our eyes, and we dig for but two hours for a soothed stalemate in the war in our minds. The truth is that there will always be a second shovel at hand, prepared for the strike of lightning of hope that my father might resurrect from his vegetative death. The truth is that one of these days, one of these graves will be mine. The truth is, compared to the crusade I have resurrecting seven misguided ghosts from the ashes of the fire that slayed them?

Digging graves isn't shit.

"Your boldness stands alone among the wreck
Learn from your mother
Or else spend your days
b i t i n g your own n e c k"
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