Footsteps in the Forgotten Graveyard
At the edge of the old town, where the map ends and the wind remembers every name, lies a graveyard that time forgot. Grass brushes shoulders with weathered stones, and a gate that sags like a tired guardian. I came seeking a rumor, a tale to tell at a late-night fireside, but what I found was a rhythm in the dark—the steady thud of footsteps that was not mine.
Moonlight spilled across marble, outlining the carvings of names faded to whispers. The air tasted of rain and iron, of old stories that cling to stones until the years forget them too. I moved along the path as if stepping through a memory, and with every step, the ground beneath seemed to breathe, drawing me deeper into a map I could not quite read.
“Do not listen for voices, traveler,” the stones seem to say, “listen for the silence between the steps.”
The footsteps began behind me, then in front, then around the bend. They matched my pace, my breaths, my hesitations. It was as though I walked with a second shadow—one that knew the names carved on the stones long before I did. A rusted lantern flickered to life, hovering at eye level, though there was no wind to lift it. Its glow turned the cemetery into a theater of echoes, each beam tracing a line that felt almost like a genealogy of the forgotten.
- The moss where a finger used to rest, now polished by years of unasked questions.
- A bench that sighed when I passed, as if exhaling the histories it kept locked inside.
- A bell that tolled from nowhere and everywhere at once, counting beat by beat with my own pulse.
- Names that reappeared in the frost—letters I had not yet learned, spelling out a kinship I never wished to claim.
When I reached the oldest plot, the air thickened, and the footsteps slowed, then stopped. The ground before the ancient oaks parted as if the earth itself leaned to listen. A final voice rose from beneath the soil—soft, patient, ancient as the dirt—and I understood that some wanderings do not end with an exit, but with an invitation: to stay, to remember, to become a rumor carried on the night wind.
As I backed toward the gate, it did not bar my escape but offered a patient, unbearable choice: walk back into the world, or let the forgotten steer your steps into their quiet eternity. The graveyard did not chase me; it invited me to listen and to listen again, until I remembered who I am only when the dead remember me too.