Getting to my feet, I wander and weave through the many gravestones.
The newborns, proclaimed with little pictures of lambs and cradles. Who would they have grown up to be?
The military men, sporting fluttering american flags. Did they want this?
The forgotten ones. The ones I find most heart-wrenching. The stones that have drooped or fallen, the lettering hard or impossible to read, the people who haven't seen flowers for the longest. They have no living relatives left, or maybe they have just been forgotten. Looking around, I find some flowers, real flowers, growing around the edges of the cemetery. Plucking them from their stalks, I place them carefully on granite surfaces. I regret that I don't have enough to give one to each of the long since loved people underneath me.
After I have exhausted my supply of the plants, I walk around the oldest part of the fenced in area, knowing that I easily miss all of them, though I never would have met most of them.
And as I leave, maybe it was the imagination of a lonely teenager, but it felt as if they were reaching out to me, holding on to me with the love that they hadn't felt in many years. And it hurt, it hurt bad, but at the same time, it felt wonderful, that love I felt, from just a simple thing.