Who were those people who had once been so important that their death resulted in the creation of a whole cemetery?
They must have been pretty significant but now as I look around it seems that all they have left behind is a cemetery with disappeared epitaphs, faded hues, discolored walls, plaster rainfalls, broken and exposed bricks and dust covered carvings. The place that had once been built to be remembered forever is long gone forgotten. The place that was meant to be found is lost with time and ignorance.
As the cemetery stands for its impending inevitable disappearance, as bones lay buried in the coffins patiently waiting for their complete gradual annihilation, we walk above them clicking photos of what once had been beautiful, we laugh because the people buried around us died more than a century ago and we didn’t know them at all, never have we heard about them, never will we. If there aren’t many people around, some of us even dare to make some private memories. Of course disrespect was not even the last thing in our minds but who has ever been able to control his or her overwhelming desires? Sometimes, it seems like a nice place to smoke a joint or two but we are just trying to enjoy our lives a little more, what’s wrong with that? Children come here in the evening to play cricket. Well after all there is nobody to come here with flowers and weep.
What’s wrong with all this anyway? What is the point in being respectful to people who died more than a century ago and do not come even a mile close to our ancestry? And besides what lie buried here are just a couple of brittle bones, how are they disrespected if we come here to play or to smoke or to snog or to just have some fun? How are they offended? We never bothered to respect life, we never bothered to respect history, we never bothered to respect time, we never bothered to respect love so why should we respect century old skeletons? Obviously nobody cares about them so why should we?
And yet when I look at this disfigured place, I can’t help but wander into the labyrinth of my pessimistic thoughts-
Who will even think of building a sepulcher when I will die? Even with these almost one fifty years of ignorance, this cemetery has somehow managed to survive. I wonder a century from now whether anyone will spend even a second mourning over the fact that my grave bears no epitaph. Will there be anyone who will secretly wish that the grave lying in front of him/her could have been maintained in better way? Who will wonder about the existence of the body lying beneath? Who will? I don’t even think that my grave will last that long. It would be destroyed way before to bury some new body. These brittle walls tease me, this impaired burial place laughs at me, these dusted fading paintings and carvings mock me and I stand here in awe, in amazement. I ought to feel humiliated. But I don’t. I am not offended at all. Because I don’t care about my fleeting existence. I don’t care if I am not in the history. I don’t care if I am not remembered. All I care about is how beautiful this place had once been. How wonderful it would be if it could be that beautiful again.
Snap out of it, turquoise ink! You know that nothing lasts.
Nothing lasts. Yes. But this place can still be saved, right?
The Turquoise Ink 