Every day, the ritual is pretty much the same. I get in my car, make six left turns and three right turns, and I park outside the gates of Riverside Cemetery. The entrance is at the top of the cemetery, which sits on the side of a hill. I follow its path down and around in widening circles, like I’m traversing the tiers of a wedding cake. 14,000 people are interred in Riverside, give or take. Thomas Wolfe, our city’s most famous son, is buried here. So are O. Henry and George Masa. Large mausoleums sit next to small marble graves, new interspersed among old.

If you follow the asphalt path to the left, you’ll see a monument on your way down. A life-size bronze Jesus sits on a bench, holding a small bronze bird and surrounded by curious bronze children. A low brick retaining wall encloses them all. I watched the construction of this grave as I walked my circles. Cut into the side of the hill, it faces West, towards the mountains and the setting sun. 

I live in the same town where I went to college. Aside from a year away at graduate school, I haven’t left. I had a hard time in grad school, and by the time I submitted my thesis and packed my bags, I was desperate for the familiar. I latched on to a quote from John Darnielle:

“People say that you should really do something out of your comfort zone. Why? I worked very hard to find my comfort zone. It was really rough and I can’t even get there that often. Takes all day and I gotta get off to a good start and do all the right things and avoid the right people and find all the right people and do all of these things to find my comfort zone…My comfort zone is hard-won….” When I read that, the arrow struck true and I said yes, I am going back to the comfort zone. Back to my small, college mountain town.

My concern upon return was that memories of my college love would be painful. They were, but less immediately so than memories of my younger self. At restaurants and bars and on sidewalks I was constantly confronted with an eighteen-year-old me, a twenty-one-year-old me, a me who still had endless potential and time and space in which to mess up. My life, over a decade later, doesn’t look the way I thought it would when I left for graduate school. I didn’t plan on coming back to this place; I planned on starting the rest of my life. The rest of my life was going to happen somewhere else. It’s easy to get sucked in and sucked under by the rhythm of my past choices. My habits. Doing things much the same way I did when I was eighteen. Same grocery stores, same friends, same streets, same life. 

I moved into an apartment I found on Craigslist. It was in a large, converted Colonial Revival house in one of Asheville’s historic neighborhoods. Each door had a glass doorknob, and the kitchen had a huge, white porcelain farmhouse sink that only sometimes leaked. I rediscovered Riverside while living there, just a five-minute walk away. Go down the stairs, walk up the street, take a left on Pearson Drive, a right on Birch Street, and walk the length of the road, which ends at the cemetery gates. 

When the year’s first snow fell, I layered up and walked to Riverside. I had the cemetery to myself but was not the day’s first visitor. I walked in other people’s footprints as I made my laps. My feet stayed warm in my waterproof boots as I moved through puddles and slush. All color had been leached from the sky and the trees and the ground. Graves had become only lumps of snow. 

With no one around I was safe from perception. There was no need to keep a corner of my mind worrying about how I looked to passersby. I was free to focus entirely outward and upward, suspended in this place more beautiful than I had ever seen it. There were still new things to experience, I realized, in this town where I thought I knew all the tricks. 

I kept going back. 

My first visit to Riverside was in college. Me, my two best friends, and someone I was romantically interested in all went together, piled in a white Corolla. I was self-conscious in my dark blue jersey dress and kept my denim jacket on the entire time. It was too warm for a jacket. My crush snacked on an apple as we walked and told us you could eat the whole thing, core and all. I swallowed the bitter core of my own apple to be a different type of girl. His posture was relaxed as we circled, hands in his pockets. He was not performing at all. 

In remembering this I’m frustrated with myself. How could I have visited this place, my favorite place, and paid so little attention to the tombstone carvings, the light behind the leaves, the ends of the overgrown weeping willow gently stroking the path. I was so focused on him that I missed it all. 

There is a reason people typically do not eat the apple core, even if you can. It is not very good. 

I take endless photos of Riverside’s trees. Pictures of the same tree taken in different years. The same tree within the span of a few days to document its changing color. One autumn, hundreds of red, orange, and yellow leaves were arranged in an ombre circle around a tree trunk. I didn't initially realize this wasn’t how the leaves naturally fell. It took me a moment to see the human hand involved. I took photos because it felt like something that would disappear if I walked away. It was an offering I wasn’t sure I was really seeing.

In the cemetery, grave decorations signal seasonal change, sometimes more than nature’s own signs. Pumpkins and gourds replace Fourth of July banners and red, white, and blue pinwheels overnight. A light-up, artificial Christmas tree appears on one grave every December without fail. I’ve never seen anyone putting it up or taking it down. I’m touched by the people who keep seasons in mind and make trips to gently change out decorations and refresh flowers. It is a display of tenderness on such a large scale, those invisible hands more reliable than any calendar. 

One night I was in the cemetery, walking my circles in the dark, when I got a text. Tickets for Neko Case at The Orange Peel, available through a friend’s brother. Did I want to go? If I had already walked back to my apartment and gotten situated for the night, I wouldn’t have been easily lured back out. But in the cemetery I was just outside of my life enough for a solo, spontaneous concert to sound fun to someone who rarely does spontaneity. 

I drove downtown and picked up my ticket at will call. Inside, I bought a beer and situated myself against the back wall. A steady flow of bathroom-goers and those angling for a better view moved in and out of the empty space between me and the crowd. Small conversations started and stopped all around me. I drank my beer slowly.

The show was beautiful. It was the first time I’d ever been to a concert alone. I left thinking, “Why don’t I do things like this more often?” It was special and different and so much more spiritually nourishing than sitting on my couch, watching an episode of a TV show I’ve already seen a hundred times. 

It is good for me to try new things and leave room for “wonder and awe” (as my therapist says) in my routines. Both are very good at banishing the worst of my dark thoughts. I often forget about wonder and awe, amid packing my lunch for work and going to work and answering emails and going to the grocery store on the way home. I’m a creature of habit, wondering instead what it is to be a creature of wonder and awe and what is new.

It was in this spirit that I took out my journal and made a list of “magical places.” These are the places and spaces in which it feels easy for me to access wonder and awe. I wrote Riverside Cemetery, the Parkway, and then a few other places around Asheville. But sometimes I don’t want to drive downtown and park to go to the Basilica, and during the pandemic my favorite bar—with its Victorian furniture and gas lamps that make me feel like I’m time traveling—was closed. So, more nights than not, I walk through the cemetery gates.

With time, I come to have a favorite grave. I have a fondness for the Victorians and their grand funerary traditions, and Riverside is full of the carved urns and obelisks and laurel garlands typical of that period. I have my pick of graves to ogle. My very favorite, however, is a joint tombstone that rests over the graves of a husband and wife. The marble is carved in the shape of two interlocking hands, reaching for each other from either side of the stone: a symbol of hope for reunion in the next life. 

I’ve always loved this interlocking hands motif, so much so that I had a friend incorporate the symbol into my now-defunct vintage store logo. I like to think of one hand as my own, reaching back to hold the hand that history offers. Alternately, it is my hand reaching back to my own hand in the past, a hope for reunion not with someone who has left but with someone I sometimes forget. 

I started going on long walks in high school. I was obsessed with a book series at the time, and I liked to walk and imagine I was a character in the books, or that a movie adaptation was being made and I was one of the actresses. I’d walk for hours, fantasizing and listening to action movie soundtracks and sad playlists to match my mood.

My family's house was on a cul-de-sac, and I only ever looped the street. I liked to walk at night because Atlanta is hot. I’d walk until the streetlights came on, and then my dad would come stand out at the end of the driveway and wave me inside. I could see him, small and backlit by the porch light, as I rounded the curve in the street. I was always upset to end my walks. It felt easier to dream outside, under the expansive sky that turned from blue to lilac to black as I circled. 

Though I’ve left the book series behind, I do much the same thing in Riverside. When I’m there, it’s easy to set aside what currently is, and to think about what could be. I think about moving, all the time: back to the country where I went to graduate school, or somewhere up north where it’s colder. I think of the people I’ll meet, and jobs I’ll have, and how things can only get better from here. 

I don’t know why, in a town where it feels like I’ve done everything before, but memories don’t stick to Riverside. The cemetery functions as somewhat of a liminal space, a space where I can step outside of my life. It’s the same feeling you get when you travel. It’s easier to be impartial and realize your living situation is tenuous, or you hate your job, or you’ve long overstayed your welcome in the place where you live when you’re halfway across the country in a hotel room overlooking a highway. I get the same opportunity for reflection in the cemetery, only without the cost of a plane ticket.

I once heard romantic relationships described as the result of waking up and asking yourself daily, “Do I still want to do this?” Some people say yes forever, others ask and one day find the answer is no. I think this is a question we could ask ourselves every day, about everything in our lives. It is so easy to forget to do. Suddenly years have passed and you’re realizing no, I’m not interested in working in tech, or I’m not actually a person who enjoys hiking. You’ve just been going through the motions of a decision you made years ago, time passing more quickly than you realize.

I fear an unawareness of my own life. I don’t ever want to look around and wonder, “How did I get here?” It is the least I can do for myself to be an active participant, to know that the same grocery store and same walks and same breweries for drinks on Saturdays are all there because I want them to be. So when I bump into the memory of my eighteen-year-old self at a bar, I can greet her with fondness and not shame that so many years later, she hasn’t moved on and shies away from asking herself why.

I dream with no limitations when I’m in the cemetery. With every lap I walk under those trees I ask myself, “Do you want to change your life?” I walk and I think about comfort zones, and seasons for leaving them. I either leave content or leave knowing that something needs to change. It is not lost on me what a gift it is to propose such a lofty ask of this place, and to receive the answer to that ask every time.

Six left turns, three right turns, a left on Pearson, a right on Birch. I walk through the cemetery and do not concern myself with the ghosts of the living or the dead but only the ghosts of my past selves. Every Virginia of my last decade in this mountain town is with me as I make my laps, my sneakers crunching on dry leaves, my breath labored as I go uphill. 

In this place, we ask ourselves questions only we can answer, so that I can drive home through my college campus and thirteen years of memories and sleep well at night. So that I can wake up and head back through those cemetery gates to walk circles around the border of my comfort zone and ask my many selves which way we are going next.