Hey!
How’s your week treating you? Hopefully it’s going well.
So this week for whatever reason my mind decided to think back on a microscopic experience I had. Just a small grain of sand. But I wanted to write about it. And I wanted to include photos I took with it.
These are all photos I took while on my failed honeymoon. I don’t usually go back and dig these up, but I reference some of the visuals in the story.
Hopefully you enjoy them. Or at least connect with them.
As always, thanks so much for reading. And have a wonderful rest of your week.
Greyson
Don’t Cry For Dead Annuals
The arches welcomed us. Death awaited us.
A marble door stood polished to our side, a river of gray veins warmed under the summer sun, carrying faded coloration and memories through bleached stone. Memories of the loved ones no more, forever at peace within the mausoleum. A stunted window allows a final view of the casket inside. An eternal view of the world outside.
I continued on to the next mausoleum in silence. We continued on in silence.
My wife at my side.
We didn’t have much time left together. We both knew it.
Stained glass let streaks of blue and gold light into another resting place. Dust outlined the blades of color against a monotone world, but my thoughts drifted elsewhere. To the words of my failed wedding vows as my eyes traced over two coffins in the center of the structure.
Until death do we part.
Walking through the cemetery in Buenos Aires, it was close enough.
The Bloom of an Annual
We planned our honeymoon to be the ultimate christening of new lives together. We planned on five weeks of melting together, becoming one.
We planned.
The universe doesn’t care for plans. For dreams or desires. For feelings or souls. There are facts, and we’re left to accept or deny.
As I walked the sidewalk, open grass fields to either side, I looked to her. I hated her. To the lost feelings. The lost desires and dreams. My lost soul. I wanted to deny. To not accept. I wanted it all to go away. To have never read the text sent by her lover. To have never been told the truth.
But the universe didn’t care.
And we walked on.
A metallic chrome flower in full bloom towered over us. We didn’t stop, but I took a picture. To distract me from thought, because I didn’t want to remember.
Because the metallic flower was beautiful.
It marked the trail to the cemetery. Our afternoon destination. She wanted to see the resting place of Eva Peron. Made famous in the United States by Madonna, A material girl born in Michigan with a sudden British accent singing how a country should not cry for her.
Because her country knew what she was going through. Knew what would become of her.
I didn’t tell my family, my close friends, anyone, about the crumbling end of my brief marriage because I didn’t want them to cry for me.
I did enough of that for myself.
So we continued to the cemetery, with few gravestones but a small city of mausoleums instead. A city built on the tears of love left behind.
At Peace
The ruins of one mausoleum lay in contrast to the polished marble and cast iron of its neighbors. Glass teeth all that remained of former stained glass. The interior tossed and searched, overseen by a crooked cross hanging from the wall. No more family to care for their house of ancestors. At least no more who desired to.
I felt sorrow for someone, but I did not know who to gift my sorry to. The dead who would not need my feelings? To family that had moved on? Maybe in the shards of glass, I saw myself reflected a million times over, the sorrow directed at me.
The cemetery is the perfect final resting place for what could have been.
Flowers marked the tomb of Eva. Fresh flowers. Not those of government displays, but of simple means. Of people. Of people who cried for her and maybe still do. In a cemetery of ornate, hers was ordinary. But in the land of stone, a single flower triumphs all.
A cat jumped past my feet. It startled me. I jumped back, my hand touching hers.
My wife’s.
It flinched. Or maybe it was mine. But I let my hand linger. Hers slowly came to mine. As if not sure what to expect. Perhaps my hand would dart away out of startled terror. But it didn’t. I held her hand, and I could feel it. Moments after the rush of remembering what it was like to touch her. To feel her. There was still life there. Fading, dying life.
Dying love.
Around the corner, a couple embraced. A tender embrace. A hug. A head pressed into a shoulder. I couldn’t tell if it was from love found or love lost.
Dying love.
I did not kiss my wife. But our hands remained.
And it was enough.
Death
Walking out of the cemetery, back toward our hotel, we no longer held hands.
Yet when I looked to her, I didn’t see the hate. The anger. The frustration and loss and loneliness.
I saw what we had, and what we had was good. It simply was time to come to an end. Time to let it go. To let it die.
The giant metallic flower had closed its petals for the evening. I didn’t know the flower bloomed and wilted with the sun.
Life and death, all in the same day. It would once again bloom.
But I knew our love would not. Because annuals bloom and are brilliant and beautiful, but when the time comes, the flower, our love, would return to the earth.
And there’s no sense in crying for dead annuals.
Instead, it’s better to love and remember it for what it was.
A travel story I wrote several years ago: Travel for the Soul (Even if You Don’t Have One)
A retelling of my failed honeymoon as I experience the same journey a decade later: I retraces my steps, from Miami to Machu Picchu, as I looks to recover what's lost and discover if it's possible to find oneself while traveling for the soul.