The Ageing of Seasons

It was the most soulful spring Matt had witnessed in a long time. Wildflowers crept up from the wily cracks in the sun-baked cement; cornflowers were etched across the graveyard like buttons on a Christmas sweater.

Matt was gazing down at the scraped earth in front of him – strewn with yellow roses, magnolia ribbons and ten-cent ‘In-loving-memory’ cards. The granite headstone gazed back at him.

 A voice broke his trance; for a moment he thought it was the cornflowers speaking.

“Hi,” she said, “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”

Matt looked to his side and found a girl, about his age, her freckled face scrunched up against the sun. Her long red hair blew behind her in sudden flutters. Matt had never known anyone to make small talk in a graveyard before.

“What’s so nice about it,” His voice reeked of seasoned apathy, “It’s just like any other day.”

“Except it’s not. Nothing’s the same as it was yesterday,” Her voice was loud and perky, with a suburban drawl, yet had a rasp of knowing conviction. Matt despised the happiness pouring out of it, like rainbow jelly leaking out of a fruit basket. “For one, you’re not wearing the same clothes that you were wearing yesterday, or the leaves on the pavement are not where they were yesterday – ”

“Is that what people tell themselves to feel special these days?”

She laughed, “Got to find some excuse, haven’t I?”

“Well, maybe I don’t want one,” He dug his hands into his pockets, “Maybe I hate the fact that I could have had a beer with my best friend yesterday, and today I can’t ‘cause he’s dead.”

The girl paused for a moment then sighed, “I am sorry. I keep forgetting this is a grave. I’m sorry I interrupted –”

“You didn’t.” Matt spoke faster than he intended.

“How did he die?”

“Cancer. Colon.”

Matt felt a tightening in his stomach and decided to switch the subject. “What brings you here?”

“My father. He died six years ago, when I was thirteen.”

Matt read the grave adjacent to his best friend’s.

Arthur Jennings

PFC US Army

Loving father and husband

“Did he die in the war?” Matt asked.

“Metaphorically, maybe. He didn’t talk about the war. But he died from a heart attack later one summer.”

“I’ve never seen a wreath on a grave before.”

“It is supposed to symbolize the circular nature of life or something,” she replied, “I’ve never seen daisies on a grave before. Does it serve some grand esoteric purpose too?”

“You know Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby? Well, Ethan was a sucker for her. Crazy about the film too. He said he wanted daisies on his grave, that’s all there is to it.”

“Hey, I forgot to ask your name.”

“Matt,” he replied, hands still dug in his pockets of his bootcut jeans, instead of stretched outwards in greeting.

“Pleased to meet you,” she smiled, “Daisy Jennings.”

Matt wheeled towards her with widened eyes, like a doe caught in a headlight.

She laughed, filling the air with honey. “Kidding,” she said, “I’m Astrid. Do you want to get coffee sometime, Matt?”

Matt and Astrid were meeting up in the Dorsby Café more often than they could’ve imagined. Matt would order an orange frothy and Astrid would order a diet coke. They would take the small table by the window every time. Astrid would watch the subtle darting in Matt’s eyes when he would speak, sometimes focusing on the salt-stained table top, sometimes on the rain-streaked tempered glass.

He would often talk about the weather. Not as a filler to squeeze into empty spaces of their conversation but because it genuinely fascinated him. He knew things like which trade-winds were causing which showers, what the different shapes of clouds were called and which direction they were headed towards. Like big flurry sailboats struggling to find a way home.

Other times he would talk about how he wanted to be a musician, but his parents thought he was no good, especially after he had to start seeing a therapist and got prescriptions of bottled pills. He’d find his dad shaking his head when he’d walk into the room, or his mom sighing in stoic dismay as she served him breakfast.

“I don’t get why they have to make me feel like I’m diseased.” Matt would say.

“Maybe they’re just worried.” Astrid would reply. He would scoff.

He had learnt all about music from his best friend Ethan. A sad kind of glow would wash over his face when he talked about Ethan and Astrid would wonder if Ethan was more of a family to him than his parents.

“I wish I could see the world like you do, Astrid.” He said one say, looking into her eyes for the first time, before looking away almost instantly.

“You know the world never stays the same, right?” She said, “And neither the way you see it.”

Despite the look of cemented cynicism on his unreadable face, Astrid could see a longing affection for the world in Matt’s black eyes. The way he would slouch back in his seat and observe people, and the way his lips would curl up in a smile when a kid would do something funny at their next table, the way he would always tip extra when leaving, or the way he would wait for her to find a cab before he took one. She would often think of him as a sort of precious tragedy.

Matt invited Astrid to a party at his house on a weekend his parents weren’t home. Astrid found herself in a stuffy living room with a bunch of college kids smoking pot and talking about capitalist dreams. Astrid learnt that Matt had these parties often; not because he particularly enjoyed their company, but because he longed to fill the silence sometimes. Besides, it was the only way he would get his hands on dope, and could make his transient escapade into an ocean of throbbing, colourful nothingness.

When everyone was either wasted or had gone home, he sat with Astrid on their sloping roof and they kissed with beer-tainted lips. Matt lit a smoke and offered one to Astrid. She declined; he stuck it between his lips and breathed, slowly and powerfully, as if trying hard to feel something.

“Do you still think about your dad, Astrid?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, “I don’t exactly remember his voice and stuff. But I still imagine talking to him in my head. If I try on a new dress, I imagine asking him how I look, and him nodding and saying I look nice.”

“I think he would be proud of you,” Matt sounded like he meant it, and Astrid looked at him. A certain redness was creeping into his eyes.

“He wouldn’t like me much though, I think,” he said.

Astrid laughed, “Not in this picture, no.”

“Remember the first day when you told me that everything changes? You were so right. Every damn thing changes. In fact, sitting here, I can almost kind of feel the earth spin.” Matt spun his head around and laughed.

“You’re so wasted.”

“You know what I’m going to do?” he took her hand and looked at her, something inscrutable dancing in his eyes, “I’m going to write songs about this. About us.”

“That would be cool,” Astrid found herself smiling, “But maybe you should rest now.”

“It will be beautiful. This night won’t die, like Ethan, or your father.”

They kissed some more, like songbirds, swallowed by a kind of magic that flutters in the veins of young lovers and criminals.

A week later, Matt was performing his first gig at the Dorsby Café, which used to be their rendezvous. Astrid watched him from their usual table; his face lit up; his voice low and viscous, perfectly complementing the soft strumming guitar in his hand. No one paid much attention to his music, being engaged in usual chatter like always, but the air definitely felt warmer, fuller. It seemed to pulsate with newfound life; like a healing thrush spreading its wings into the evening wind.

After his shift, they walked down the road by Fifth street; they passed the bus station, town pier and the graveyard where they first met. They didn’t say much; sometimes laughed when a floating leaf got stuck in their hair.

“Astrid, you know the pills I used to take?”

“Yeah?”

“I haven’t taken them for a week now.”

She pulled him to a stop, “Are you crazy? Do your parents know?”

Matt laughed, “It’s a good thing. I don’t need them as much as I used to anymore. My therapist says he’ll reduce the dosage.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve been feeling so much better.”

They kept walking, and he bent down and whispered a thanks into her ear.

“What for?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he waved it off, “Did I tell you I’ll be performing at Grand Hall theatre next week?”

“No, but that’s amazing, Matt.”

“You’ll be there?”

“You bet.”

There was a skip in their steps as they walked on the pavement, shivering occasionally from the winter gales, but their eyes aglow, like dead golden leaves strewn endlessly on the road stretching ahead.

A week later, one Tuesday afternoon, Astrid got a phone call during her shift in the library. She thought it was a prank call at first, but soon disentangled the words reaching her through bouts of convulsive sobs. It was Matt’s mother. Incoherent words tumbled through – something about Matt – something about an accident, her wrecked pink Buick, tree by the lake, dead on arrival.

Astrid found her head spinning, two copies of Dante slipping from her hands and her co-worker giving her an ugly look. She ran outside, and kept running; past the parking lot, local church, Dorsby cafe and the graveyard. She did not know where she was going, but she felt there was some place she needed to be. Her heart was pounding; her ears still ringing from the sobs she heard on the phone – till she realised it was her own throat choked with tears. She sat down on the park bench and watched the cars flit by, people walk by, and leaves float down in tender surety. A big empty wave washed over her and she realised, with blurry-eyed stillness, that there was nowhere she needed to be.

A week later, Matt had his service in the Waltham Graveyard. Although Astrid had been there infinite times, the place looked different today. The cornflowers seemed to have changed colour, and the birds did not sing anymore; they chattered in puzzling incoherence.

The weathered faces looked the same, sounded the same, and were dressed in the same all-engulfing black. Stories flew around town like ambers carried by the breeze. Some didn’t want to believe it was an accident. After all, Matt was depressed, wasn’t he? His parents would keep telling everyone how their son was held prisoner by a terrible plague. A plague from which people barely recovered. Perhaps people like Matt’s parents were conditionally faithless, Astrid thought.

Astrid’s father used to tell her stories about the war. How there were different kinds of it, and everyone ended up fighting some kind of battle anyway. He had seen soldiers die, but also watched them heal miraculously. Human hearts are fallible, he used to say, like sensitive baby birds, but if there was anything as endless as the sea and sky, it was its courage. Matt wouldn’t have wanted to die, thought Astrid. Perhaps he had just set out for a drive one night, to feel the wind; he liked winds and stars and open roads. He liked to remember things.

The gathering thinned as dusk crept in. After everyone was gone, Astrid stood in front of Matt’s grave, staring at the fresh paint and bold letters that seemed to be staring back at her. She wanted to say something, but the idea ridiculed her to the bones. She couldn’t talk to a headstone. Matt was gone.

Someone spoke in a low thick voice, and she turned; half-expecting to find Matt smiling at her with his pacific eyes. But another boy faced her, about her age, with sun-burnt skin and a messy tousle of straw hair.

“Are you okay?” He asked.

“I’m fine,” she didn’t meet his gaze. Crestfallen, empty.

“You’ve been standing here for hours,” he said, “I thought something might be wrong. Am I disturbing you?”

Astrid kept staring down downwards, as if willing the headstone to crack. How she wished the grass would stop growing, or the clouds would stop floating. But she knew they wouldn’t.

“No,” she said after a long while, “Who did you lose?”

“My grandfather,” he said, “He was in a coma for three months. What about you?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Sorry,” the boy said, then studied his grave, “He liked lilies?”

Astrid laughed softly, “I don’t really know what flowers he liked. I wanted to give him lilies because Matt was a primed pessimist. He’d like them.”

“My grandfather used to say that people spend way too much time figuring out how the departed would have wanted it. What kind of flowers, what kind of scented candles, what colour of quilt. In the end, I don’t think they would have cared either way whether we placed camellias or lilacs on their graves.”

Astrid didn’t want to believe him. “But don’t we all want to feel special?”

“Yes we do,” he had a mild glow in his coffee eyes, “But perhaps we don’t need to try and find ourselves in everything we see around us. Some things cannot be preserved. They pass, like days and nights.”

She looked up at the sky, painted orange by the culminating winter sun. The gold of the dusk would slowly turn red, then purple, then a still black – like Matt’s eyes. Trees would change colours, winds would change direction. She pictured the flowers on Matt’s grave slowly turning brown and becoming one with the soil. The empty furrows would line up with fresher headstones, and her own name would be written on one, and perhaps this strange boy’s on another.

“I would want jasmines on my grave,” Astrid said, out of the blue.

“Wow, you were quick in embracing the turning wheel,” he said, “What’s your name? I forgot to ask.”

“Astrid,” She hugged herself with her arms, instead of stretching her hand outwards in greeting.

“I’m Rory,” he replied.

He rubbed together his gloved hands as a cold gale whipped around them. For a moment, everything was still. No birds chirped, no leaves rustled. Something told them that spring was on its heels, tiptoeing into the barren dry grass inch by inch. The silence started getting familiar, like the comforting smell of a distant bakery; like a song they’ve heard a million times before. Astrid was staring ahead at the endless stretch of grass; slowly darkening with the dying sun.

“It’s getting cold,” Rory said, and their eyes met, “Do you want to get coffee sometime, Astrid?”