If this is a cemetery, then I must be the grave keeper, the revenant that drifts past the stark slabs of painted mourning, of some aged and gracefully departed and others too young to be so savagely stolen, polishing the headstones of remembered smiles and tears with the circles of my palms, breathing onto the weathered engravings some dear promise that I’d think if they were alive, would encircle them like a worn cotton blanket, a promise that even when they outgrew time in those mossy caverns of theirs, even when their spirits became too heavy to be held in the sunken memories, I would still be here, tending to their perseverance and their legacy, vaulting into them the plainly deciphered echo of unforgiving temperance, that I would never leave, I would forever remain their faithful and humble servant, a caretaker of the lost, an accountant of the forgotten.