Graveyards have never creeped me out. In every horror movie or scary show (I'm looking at you, Supernatural), I think it's a requirement to include at least one scene in a graveyard. Mist covers the ground (where the heck is all that mist coming from anyway?), a wolf howls in the distance, a dark shape runs past the camera, yada, yada, yada. Graveyards are meant to be scary. But they just aren't for me. To be honest, I find graveyards (or cemeteries, as they're called everywhere but in the horror genre) peaceful, calming even. The birds are chirping, the scent of fresh-cut grass consumes me, a total silence rests upon the place. Granted, I've never taken a page out of Tom Sawyer's book and gone there at midnight, but cemeteries just don't put me off. Instead of being scared of the headstones, I do a little math game with them. I subtract the year of birth from the year of death in order to figure out how old the person was upon their passing. Did they die young? Were they as old as Moses? Which ones were my age? It reminds me of my morality and how every day could be my last. I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks at the two years etched across the headstones. But I don't think the dates are the important part. Neither are the names, or the cliche phrase like "loving wife, sister, cousin, roommate, etc." The most important part of someone's headstone is the dash between the birth year and the death year. The dash. An entire life. Every laugh, every inside joke, every bike ride, every cup of coffee, every job promotion, every hour of TV, every trip to the beach, every pop quiz, every loss, every bag of Doritos, every tear and heartbreak and hug and "I love you" of a person's life, all crunched together into one small line carved into a stone. We are not defined by our births, nor are we defined by our deaths. We are defined by what's in the middle. The dash. Oscar Wilde once said  “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” I don't want my dash to an existence. I want my dash to be a painful, inspiring, love-abundant, over-too-soon life. I'd rather die than not live at all.  My writing does not have a theme, nor does it have pattern. Because life doesn't either. One day it's hilarious, the next day it's tragic. I just came here to write. To put this segment of my dash into words, for anyone to see. I have no idea how long my dash will be, but I'll be d**ned if I don't make it count. Ben Franlin said "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." I disagree. Your dash is unavoidable too. So, what will you do with yours?