I don’t know how I’d ended up here. Or were exactly _here_ is.

But at some point between making my way back from, my girl, Maisee’s house on a bike I’d passed by a graveyard. A bit morbid, but especially in the dead of night, but I needed this right now.

I needed anywhere but home.

So now I was wandering from gravestone to gravestone, reading names and final messages:

_Ida Earlston, 1866 - 1879. _Ida died young, and a very very long time ago. This graveyard must be ancient, the soil beneath my feet, the home to the dead spanning across 100s of years. Thirteen year old Ida Earlston’s last words — word actually, read. “Mother.”

Whispering all around me, the nighttime air exfoliates, I feel the tone it was spoken in, the fear in Ida’s tone all those years ago, the grief her mother must’ve felt until she joined her in whatever is next..

I don’t think those would be my last words, I’d never even met my mother; my foster parents, they’re OK but they don’t look like me. My skin is darker, my hair coily instead of long, soft and silky. This reality often served as a point of interest for others and a reminder, that I’ll never truly be at home.

_Rebecca Hazel Laiseac, 1996 - 2025. _This is interesting, Rebecca died sometime this year. I spend a moment pondering, three months in it; Rebecca’s family was likely still mourning her. And by the looks of the bed of flowers that bring warmth to an otherwise cold block of stone, tells me she had alot of them. My eyes drift down to her last words, and all color drains from my face.

It’s not words, but a name. . . one identical to mine, so clearly carved in stone, an order to find me, that she was sorry, she wanted to see me in her final moments. Me, Jonathan Thompson.