• I hear your voice from my room. It travels through my open window alongside the warm summer night air. Your voice is tantalizing and sweet. I sit there in my window and listen to you sing from wherever you where and sigh at the beauty.

    Each night for the next week and a half, it was the same. I would sit in the windowsill and listen from eight forty two till nine fifty and lose myself in your intoxicating voice. After two weeks, I decided to seek out the owner of the voice.

    Instead of waiting in my room for your voice that night, I pulled on my boots and jacket and followed the lamenting melody to its location of origin.

    I recognized the gates when I go there, their shadow stretched out long across the sidewalk and street to my side. You where singing from somewhere in the graveyard. How you go t in, I didn’t know. The gates where locked. But there you where, in all your beauty and sadness, perched upon a tall gravestone releasing your melody to the world.

    Amazed, I stood there for twenty minutes and listened to you sing. Then, you let your last note echo into the night sky and gracefully slid down off the tombstone in one fluid motion. After a deep, but unsure breath, I speak up.

    “Hello.” It was a timid and unsure voice that came out, which was the exact opposite of what I felt. I was excited and nervous at the same time. I should have been terrified, I really should have. I was a lone teenager out late on a Friday night speaking to a total stranger through the gates of a graveyard.

    She turns to look at me. There I was, standing at the gates to the home of the head. My hands around the bars of the gate.

    “Who… Who are you?” She asks, worried. Had she not wanted to be caught? Was she worried I would report her for trespassing in the graveyard after hours?

    “I’m a fan of your voice… I guess.” I smiles sheepishly, I wasn’t ready to give out my name to complete stranger, no mater how beautiful her voice as. “I’ve heard you singing for the last two weeks. Your voice is amazing!”

    Surprised, the girl pulls her hair out of her face and up into a ponytail before responding. “Th-thank you…” She murmurs. “I’m a girl of the graveyard, I guess.”

    “How did you get in? The gates are locked.” I rattle the gates as if to prove my point. Smiling, she holds up a key chain with several odd, old looking, keys.

    “I could let you in… if you want.” She says. Her voice is soft and pretty, even when she wasn’t signing. I nod, excited.

    “That would be great.” Without another word, the girl unlocks the gate and opens the door to her right, my left, and holds it open for me. I enter the graveyard, and stand there beside her as she closes and locks the gate. Suddenly, I realize how conscious I am of how close our bodies where to each others.

    “Would you… like me to show you around?” She asks, a little unsure. I smile to her.

    “That would be nice.” And together we set off into the graveyard, hand in hand. Her hands where cold, but I guessed it was because she had been on a cold tombstone for an hour and it was a little chilly out that evening.

    The moon was high in the sky when we emerged from a patch of tries. As she turned around to look at me, I saw the moonlight light up her long black hair. She looks at me with dark eyes, a pretty smile across her face.

    “Its pretty, isn’t it?”

    “What is?”

    “The moon and the night sky.” I smile as a response, and somewhat in releif. For a moment, I had thought she had been talking about the tombs, and secretly, I hoped she had been talking about me.

    We simply walked around for a while hand in hand till I heard a church bell ring out. I counted the tolling bells and it was as if I was being pulled from a trance.

    “Oh… It’s eleven!” A sickening feeling crawls in the pit of my stomach. “I have to go! My mom will kill me if she finds out that I’ve been gone!” I run for the gates, but they where still locked. Worried, I shake them a little as if they would come unlocked if I rattled them to a certain point. The girl runs up after me. She grabs my shoulder and spins me around to look her in the face.

    “Wait, you’ll need the key.” She pulls the graveyard key off the key ring and places it in my hand. Her cool hands close my fingers around it. “Also, I wanted to say goodbye…”

    She leans forward and her cool lips brush across mine. I can smell her hair, which smelled like roses. And I could feel her breath. I didn’t think I could breath. It felt as though her kiss had stopped my breath right in my chest.

    “Goodbye… Please come back tomorrow night. I’ll be waiting for you.” She leans forward and whispers into my ear: “And, my name is Yune.”

    She pulls away from me. I turn around and unlock the gate as she begins to walk away from me. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” I promise over my shoulder as I exit the gates, relocking them once safely on the other side of the gate.

    The next night was similar in fashion. We me tat the tomb and I let my self in. wWhen she finished singing her beautiful song, we set across the grave yard together. My arm wrapped around her waist.

    And, as before, I left when the church bells tolled eleven o’ clock. But, this time the kiss was a little bit more. A little longer, a little more meaningful, a little more intimate.

    I left the graveyard that might with my hand on my lips. They felt warm to touch.

    This continued for more than a month. I became more and more separated from the world. I was more irritable at home and my friends and school thought I was acting suspiciously. My nights went from being a mundane time at which I went to sleep, but an addicting drug. I pushed luck and stayed later. Our kisses became more fierce, and soon Yune and I where inseparable in the night air. Finally, when the church bells tolled one in the morning, and I was too tired to stay any later, she stopped me.

    “No, don’t go.”

    “But, I have to.”

    “No, you don’t. Stay here with me. Just tonight, please.”

    I smiled and shut the gates.

    “Alright, but just this once.”

    Our smiles bright and warming, the two of us set off and started our way back though the graveyard we knew so well as our own.

    Soon, we found a tombstone with a large white angel on it. Yune curled up under it, and motioned for me to join her. Embarrassed, and unsure of what to do, I lay down beside her. Her smaller form seems to curl right into mine. We just lie there, on our sides together. Soon, I close my eyes and fall asleep with my hand in her hair, while she sang a soft lullaby in my ear.

    The next morning, I was panicked. I sit up, only to realise I’m alone.
    “Yune?!!” I c all out, but nobody answers my call. “YUNE??!!!?”

    Maybe she went home… I told myself as I heard voices from near the gates. I only give them partial attention as I give the area around me a quick, but careful, sweep from my sitting position in the grass. I was in such a state of shock, that by the time the voices and their rightful owners found me, I didn’t even notice my mom holding me tight in her arms.

    “I was soooo worried about you!!! Never ever run away from me again!!!!” She pulls me into an even tighter hug than I was already in. But, I feel it and see it like an outsider. I was in a daze. Just what had happened? “What happened???!!” She insists. “Why on earth did you come here?!”

    “I…” I rack my brain for an excuse to be caught in the graveyard where I had obviously slept the night before. “I needed some air so I went out for a walk. When I got here the gate was open, but when I tried to leave last night somebody had shut the gates and they where locked. So I spent the night here.”

    My mom finally releases me from her tight embrace and leads me home. I repeat my story to a couple family members over the phone, a couple friends who called, two reporters, and my dad when I get home.

    That night, I set out again to the graveyard. I had my key in my pocket, and I was counting on Yune to be there with her voice waiting for my arrival.

    But, there was just silence in the graveyard. Just silence. No singing, no voices, no Yune. Just me.

    I came back night after night for over a month. But, Yune never came. I asked several people if they might know her, or recognize her. But they all just looked at me confused and said that they didn’t know anybody who looked or acted like that.

    I eventually just settled for the fact that she was gone.

    I even began to tell myself it had been a dream, or an illusion. I even convinced myself that she was fake. But, it didn’t explain my key to the graveyard, which still works. But, I still find it amusing to sit down, hum one of her many lamenting melodies to myself, and wonder who and what she really had been.