I suppose I am a member of a certain genus, a certain sad fraternity scattered across the world, who are never quite comfortable, wherever we are. We can manage to feel like outsiders even in the company of old frends; we consider the notion of making new friends a fanciful prospect, better undertaken by those who possess the youthful optimism or naïveté that suits such foolish ventures. How did we manage to acquire any friends in the first place? It happened somewhere in the distant past…

But I don’t say any of this to arouse your commiseration. You will understand this story just as well whether I have your sympathy or not—it is rather an impersonal narrative, in which I feature more or less as a disinterested observer. I set off with a bit of self-pitying autobiography only to establish (or excuse) the inciting circumstances that gave rise to the more stimulating story to follow.

The reader can easily understand that a gentleman of my disposition would find himself feeling especially out-of-place on moving to a new city, far from his home; the especially charitable reader would be able to believe that this feeling might persist for a period of some months, even a year. Keeping to myself for all this time entailed that I had not learned in any great detail the layout of my own neighborhood. My mental image of the city, extending beyond the locations of any immediate necessity to me, quickly became darkened and blurred—those streets were overhung with heavy clouds, and who could guess whether in those uncharted reaches there be dragons?

Should one feel ashamed of such ignorance? If not, might one nonetheless feel ashamed of the cowardice from which such ignorance arises? On some days, I could justify it all to myself; on other days, I could not, and resolved to correct the flaws in my character by taking a “leisurely stroll” out into the world: beyond the limits of what I knew, beyond the limits of where I needed to be, and (when I felt especially guilty) into the realm where prudence would suggest I probably ought not to go. A gentleman of my disposition rarely possesses a hiker’s instincts for preparation or safety, and I found myself capable of wandering much further abroad than I had intended, and wishing I had brought a water bottle.

On one such excursion, as I made my way back home, I chanced upon an old, unkempt cemetery. The weeds had grown almost to the top of the tombstones, all of which were dirty and crumbling. There was no fence to separate the graveyard from the surrounding land; there was no sign to give the place a name. In the years since I have been unable to find this cemetery on any map—although I hope the reader won’t take this detail as an intimation of some supernatural revelation in the offing. All the fact implies, so far as I can tell, is that this happened to be a particuarly small, particularly unimportant cemetery.

I wonder whether some intuitive sense of its insignificance is what inspired me to take a closer look. I had thought I was in a hurry to return home, but this discovery forestalled all other priorities. Perhaps some part of me was thinking: Nobody else knows this place is here, and I will never find it again—I had better investigate now, in as much detail as I can! That certainly wasn’t what was going through my conscious mind as I began a methodical sweep, marching down one row of graves and up the other, pushing aside the weeds where necessary to take a long look at each marker.

Of course, I quickly forgot almost everything I read. Each name, each pair of hyphen-separated dates, bespoke a real human life, likely far more interesting than my own! Yet I carried so little of that humanity away with me. I probably thought I was doing a favor for all those poor departed souls by paying them each one last iota of attention, one last thought—but what is a thought worth, if it turns to smoke at once and vanishes on the wind?

Only one tombstone made any true impression on my mind; I committed its inscription to memory, and I reproduce it here by way of paying my respects to the lonely fellow who lay some six feet beneath:

Thank you for visiting my grave.
I hope that this one is your fave.
I’ve been dead for so very long,
so I hope that you don’t think it is wrong
for me to tell you a little about
the life I had when I was up and about.
I was much more active, in those days.
I would run and jump in so many ways!
Sometimes I would ride my bike, for a thrill.
I would even ride to the top of the hill.
I was not decaying in the ground.
I was dancing and prancing around the town!
Sometimes I even jumped on the bed,
Which was oodles of fun. But now, instead,
I am the corpse that buried here lies,
Never to behold again the beautiful blue skies,
but do not let tears fill up in your eyes.
You should be happy that I passed away,
so that this wonderful message could brighten your day!
If I were alive right now,
I’d be riding my bike, or prancing in town,
and you would be kneeling, where you are, right there,
and staring like an idiot into the air.
Well, that’s the end of my inscription for you.
I had fun telling you it, and I hope reading it was fun for you, too.