The stone that finally stopped fighting me

Spent two hours today cleaning the same headstone—white marble, late Victorian, name worn to a whisper. I’d been avoiding it because it always felt like the stone was holding its breath. But this morning, after the frost cracked the surface just right, I noticed something: the weathering wasn’t damage. It was a kind of language. The way the letters softened into curves, how the cracks formed a map only the dead would read. I didn’t ‘fix’ it. I just let it be. And for the first time in years, I felt like I was standing beside someone who’d already said everything they needed to.