they tell of spring returning
The dust settles around Melchior's feet; he walks in clouds of dried leaves and summer dandelions that sprout from between the blades of grass. Butterflies flit across the tombstones that neatly mark the graveyard like a stony chess board, their pretty wings flapping gently.
Moritz is almost here and his presence can sometimes be felt in those moments between the afternoon and evening when all is lazy and hot; the crickets chirp but everything is still and Melchior can taste the anxiety of the coming night radiating from the warm ground. He is not alive, but he exists, or rather, existed, and that must count for something.
Melchior sits by Moritz's grave, crossing his feet underneath him and pulling out his bound leather journal which has grown messy and faded with time. Notes are scrawled illegibly in the margins, and somehow, Wendla's hands upon his most private possession have lent a kind of sweatiness to the cover that Melchior must be imagining.
He pulls out a fountain pen, but does not write. The air hums softly with cicadas and expectations. He is in a cemetery and there are ghosts all around, but they don't speak. They are good ghosts and they merely float unnoticed and invisible around the visitors, peaceful as ants crawling on the dirt. Some of the ghosts kneel by the graves, some lay in the daisies enjoying the sun, and some hover above the scene nervously as they watch the world continue on beneath them.
His diary is closed and laying in his lap on a slant. Melchior's woolen pants are damp with sweat.
"Nineteenth of June, eighteen ninety-four," he muses aloud. "I have come back to the village. It's a beautiful day outside. I can affirm that the world is perfect as it is- only the inhabitants need changing."