It was a pilgrimage. There was no other reason to drag yourself up to the miserable industrial town, where poverty and hopelessness soaked the very air. No wonder he wanted to leave, no wonder he got out as soon as he could and took to the road.

But here he was. Unable to escape his past, unable to escape his future.

I will never be able to explain what it felt like that day, surrounded by the named but faceless dead, in a cemetery so large it needed street names- but the only one that mattered was him. He reached me from this spot six feet under, or rather, through the dogeared, used copies of novels, pages filled with words that would never end, how could it ever end- but. The headstone cold, flat against the ground, unimpressive, unassuming even.

The grass in front was worn with all the shuffling wallflower feet that made the journey, those that looked and stared and felt everything and nothing all at once. Those that left beer bottles filled with wilting flowers, cigarettes and scribbled notes and let their mind hurtle far away, back to the first time when something, someone, shook up their life until they could hardly stand it.

And pages and words and quotes and emotion and that one night you sat in the passenger seat demanding you drive drive drive as far as possible because that was the only way to live live live because there was something inside of you that was different, something that needed more.

And for the man that gave you your life, in a sense, you honor his death, as you stand six feet above him, reminded that even the best of us turn to corpses and bones and dust through time. But not him, he was more than what lay beneath the ground where you stood, he still lived in ink and whispered 4 am conversations and madcap plans and ideas and adventures. We are all going to die, just some more than others.