Verglas, 2026

I put on a pair of cheap crampons and stomped up the mountain to the cemetery, delighted by the grip of the tiny spikes beneath my boots. The whistling wind kept me on edge in Mont Royal’s patch of forest; I walked through the trees with my head on a swivel, stepping over fallen limbs, always looking up and around, listening for creaks.

I was the only one there. Not a bird, not a squirrel’s scratch, not a footprint to be seen. The ice brought an even deeper quiet to death’s deep slumber.

The ice lay thick on old gravestones. Many of the names are already obscured by erosion, and a thick sheet of ice only further distorts their memory.

This is a place I come to often. There’s something about the swirl of love and grief resting in the stones and soil that connects me with a sense of peace. Death makes way for life; it is vital and necessary. Every autumn, leaves fall from the trees to decompose and flood the forest floor with nutrients for winter. It reminds me to trust in the way of things.

Some of the stones are broken. Some have been there for hundreds of years, getting slowly eaten by the Earth. Even a gravestone — fixed into the soil by loved ones as a testament of a life lived — has its own life cycle, eventually returning to the realm of mud and dust. What happens to the memory of a man when no one knows his name?

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.