You do not book a time with the stone remnants but they come into your day as an obdurate memory. On a squat block next to a curb. A partly dug step, that nods like a weary shoulder. You slow down. You always do. And they possess a sort of serenity that is not promoted. No gloss. No signage. Weigh, time, together pressed. Stay there long enough and the noise about you becomes dilutes. It is as though it were someone who had flicked the volume switch on the present to low. Odd, right? A piece of rock crowd controlling.
Lean towards and the surface begins to counter. There is crossing of lines at odd angles. Until it appears otherwise chips are accidental. You can imagine a hand making an erasure, and leaving the erasure. That honesty sticks. Tap pause tap–your head makes the rhythm. Perhaps, there was some kind of a jest during the work. Perhaps a great silence. Perhaps a quick good enough and home. Work ends. Weather begins. Years are as much like receipts. The marks are kept by the stone. It maintains the mood somehow.
Everyday life takes these pieces with it as old furniture, which will not go away. There is a person sitting on one to check messages. A bag is leaning against it, another robs it of a minute of shade, and passes. No ceremony. No fuss. The past does not insist on a rhetoric; it usurps a chair and hearkens. The overlap is natural, as two songs being played in the same room and not conflicting. You see it afterwards, and wonder how you overlooked it before. Occurs on a daily basis. We rush. The stones don’t.
Touch one, please. The texture is the fastest label to speak the truth. In spots rough, smooth where hands or rain had been. Your fingers follow a course which another has begun, and left unfinished. That is all right, you begin to guess stories. Accuracy isn’t the point. Connection is. Discovering a battered coin, and bending it between your fingers, dreaming of pockets it has been in. Minuscule thing, huge reverberation. These epitaphs do not seal the tale. They leave it open, so it will only be wide enough to allow you to enter and stay a little longer.