Writing Warmup: Waste Not
Written on 4/18/25 as a personal exercise. If it means not a thing to another, so be it, and praise the Lord anyway that he would give me something to comfort my heart alone.
I see you there now— after that revelation and the letter I’ll someday share— under the old juniper beside the cemetery of the country church. I’ve not been there in years, and I wonder if it's changed, though I suspect it has not. Things like that rarely do, so set in their ways. It’s not a bad thing. Tradition is comforting in that regard, and someone’s got to hold onto it.
I considered visiting there tomorrow, although I don’t think I’m meant to yet— I’ll go when I get the letter back that I’ll someday share. It’s Easter weekend, and that usually means flowers. Life. And I wonder how many of those headstones will be decorated with such a thing. How many generations does it take to stop gifting the dead with memory? The more the living care, I suppose, the deeper the guilt goes. Perhaps grief would be a kinder word. ‘Love with no place to go.’ Those aren’t my words, but it seems like an odd phrase now that I’m a little older. Shouldn’t we do what they did, the dead when they weren’t yet such a thing? They were far more resourceful than us. Waste not. Want not. Should love be the same? It would be selfish to let ourselves believe they never lost anything before our time. What did they do with it then? Love. They didn’t waste it. Perhaps they didn’t know a better way to share it, but I believe they all tried. In their toughness and teaching. They put their love onto us, whether or not it always fit correctly. I’m rambling now; that wasn’t the point of any of this.
The point is that I see you there now, beside me, under the old juniper across the gravel lane from the country church. We’ll read the letter I wrote you— the one I’ll someday share— when I go back. And although I haven’t returned yet, it seems we’re there when we talk. There’s an eagerness to sit beneath that tree again, and perhaps it is because I know what has happened there. Failing. Falling. Fixing. The latter only by your own doing.
Sometimes we don’t even talk, and I just look over the land. It’s old and humble— just the way I’d like to be when I die. I hope no one feels the need to leave flowers long after I’m gone. ‘Put the love somewhere else,’ I think, but I won’t say where. That’s for the living to decide.
I’ll be dead, and I can’t wait for that day—
— when at last, I am perfectly alive.
