It’s our second date, if you count our first meeting as a date. Still, it feels as blind a date as any, the conversation like stretching your arms out in a pitch-black room, searching for a light switch,  hoping to avoid bumping into heavy or sharp furniture.  He seems introverted, or self-contained, or possibly self-involved, but it’s hard to tell which (maybe all?) this early in our acquaintance.  I’m attracted to him and to what feels like a steady energy, but my awkwardness bungles conversational gambits and there’s no flow to what we’re saying, just Morse-code-like ventures into generally vapid verbiage. After lunch, soup we both eyed suspiciously, the discourse idles.

Now we’re on a broad street heading toward the art museum and he asks about the swathes of green on either side of us - is it a cemetery?  Yes, the oldest, I think, in town.  Historical.  Decades ago, or maybe a century now, the neighborhood bordered on ritzy, but has since moved decisively into run-down.  The cemetery, though, is well maintained, manicured, a good neighborhood.  He doesn’t like cemeteries, he says, they’re wasted land, they should be parks for people to enjoy.  The land should be used for recreation.

And suddenly, it’s like they say it is before you die: images flashing before my mind’s eye. Picnics with a boyfriend in the Grove Street cemetery where fractured headstones, unmoored from their plots, leaned against the enclosing wall.  I felt my youth and the rush of blood through my heart while we, too, leaned against the wall making out, our mouths and bodies warm, the stone cool against our skin. Paris, at nineteen: a late autumn afternoon watching prostitutes and johns (or other illicit lovers and thrill seekers - only they knew) sneak into the damp and empty mausoleums in Pere Lachaise, the cracked marble floors littered with used condoms colored like confetti.  The Protestant Cemetery in Rome, with Keats’ name writ on marble, tangled in a triangle of urban traffic so that the small lawn surrounding it seemed out of place and certainly not watery enough.  And the cemetery for wealthy bankers and burghers in Zurich, high on a hill above the lake: the lawns shimmeringly virid over sun-dazzled water. Wide, stretching spaces between the tombs, a high-rent cemetery, many of the monuments commissioned artworks, not mere tablets with names and dates, but stunning modernist sculptures in bronze and iron, marble and granite. Wealth’s clumsy gestures to the infinite.  I’ve roamed so many cemeteries, through tumbled tombstones in sad, neglected parts of Ohio and among the turbaned plots in Istanbul and Rabat. It all falls away - death, the idea of a resting place - whatever might lie beneath the body moving through the light and air above it, my very existence re-creation.

I’m trying to get a sense of this man in the seat next to mine, but the past that’s buried in me intrudes.