Hester had first been introduced to the cemetery when she was four years old. A soul inclined to poetry might characterise the young Hester as being drawn almost by fate to the place the minute she saw it, and forming an immediate spiritual bond with the incongruous urban graveyard. A more practical mind, however, would claim no one really forms spiritual bonds at that age, and Hester only discovered the cemetery because it was perhaps the only green space within walking distance of her city-centre primary school. Whichever mindset you take, the fact remains that Hester herself could not remember the moment she saw the cemetery for the first time, or how exactly she felt about it. She could, though, remember precisely when this odd corner of her hometown had gained that intangible significance it would retain for the remainder of her life.

“I heard Hester invited you to her house again this weekend. She never invites me anywhere!”

This riveting debate was taking place between two girls in Hester’s class on a bench in the cemetery gardens, while she herself watched from her vantage point underneath one of the towering oak trees opposite. They might have been any age between six and ten, when mild conflicts like these seem to matter the most.

This sort of dispute between Hester’s two closest friends over the common goal of her favour was an almost daily occurrence at that time. The accuser was a girl named Scarlett, one of the loudest in their class, and was almost always this passionate, this dogmatic, this unable to see past the smallest slights. The small, unassuming redhead beside her on the bench was Lena, much quieter and more timid than Scarlett, but just as stubborn and defensive of her opinions, which was perhaps why they argued so much. For reasons Hester was never quite sure of, both girls remained close friends of hers for much of her life; it was possibly because they needed a mediator in their frequent fights, or because Hester was never quite brave enough to initiate change in the things her childhood had revolved around, like her friends and, of course, the cemetery.

The young Hester had looked out over the rows of graves interrupted by small areas of lawn, the other girls’ argument an incessant murmur in her ear. As she listened to the sound of Scarlett’s boots angrily stomping off down the path, she laughed in spite of herself. The girls should both be ashamed of themselves. These trees, these paths, these graves had existed since the founding of the city centuries ago, and would still be there long after they themselves were buried, while Lena and Scarlett’s issue of who visited whose house would be over by next week. The cemetery’s place in the city’s history should be respected, Hester thought, and a new idea solidified in her mind. If such petty discussions were forbidden in a place like this, she would never have to be affected by them while she was here. The rusted iron railings that enclosed the cemetery could protect her from her troubles with argumentative, jealous friends, and the graves could be her sanctuary. From now on, no one could touch her here.

Of course, a child of Hester’s age would not have thought through these issues in quite this amount of depth. But she had discovered something about the place, or else she would not even now remember it as the moment she decided to come to the cemetery not just at school playtimes, but whenever she could. For the first time, she saw it as more than just a cemetery, or a sorry excuse for a local park.

“Hester! I’ve called you three times, line up, we’re heading back to school!” The pedestrian voice of her teacher brought her back to the, albeit small, troubles one faces in the first ten years of life, and once again they seemed the most important thing in the world. But she had not forgotten the power of the cemetery, and she never would.

The paths meander in between the endless lines of headstones, and as you walk along them, you somehow get to know this city’s past better than you could ever do by reading a history book. Then you reach the lawn, where the children play, and the nostalgia, the longing, the whole experience of the place washes over you, and you’re strangely at peace. It’s romantic, in its way. Perhaps I’ll show it to you someday.

These words were Hester’s own, written what would later feel like a hundred years ago, to the young man she thought she loved, who lived a hundred miles away at the other end of the country. For Hester, and for many of her age both then and now, love was less about the person, but the experience. No matter how painful and impractical she knew it would prove to be, she wanted to attempt a foolhardy love affair over distance when she could easily have found someone closer to home; she wanted to write over-formal letters that would not have sounded out of place two centuries earlier; she wanted all the drama, the intensity that came with love, whatever sort of person it may be with.

Hester never did show him the cemetery. Whatever had motivated them to maintain their love over distance, it faded quickly: there were the obvious practical flaws, of course, but Hester soon realised that her attachment to him had never been anything more than fleeting. She had experienced the kind of dramatically futile passion she saw in the movies, but once she had tired of the hectic desperation that dominated their letters, she came to know that her true heart, solitary, guarded, internal, was not the type to be readily shared.

It was then that Hester returned to the cemetery that she had so vividly described in her letters. As she often did in those days, she thought of him as she lingered in the gardens, and of the reasons why they had come to part. Hester stared at the ground beneath her feet, her eyes passing over the paving stones, covered in inscriptions in an ancient and incomprehensible version of her native language. Even if everything had worked out, and he had returned to my city, Hester realised, I never could have brought him here. Their time together had never been without turmoil, especially in the very last weeks, all the suppressed emotion built up during her sixteen years overflowing like a trickling stream after a rainstorm. Yet her cemetery was the opposite of that, a place where her own heart and mind could be put aside, where she was united with the leaves fallen from the trees, with the peeling paint on the railings, with the rich history of the city.

How could she bring the individual who had caused her to question her heart so much to a place where matters of the heart meant so little? She was suddenly reminded of her shame on behalf of Scarlett and Lena years earlier, and realised how much she had come to respect the cemetery since then. This, after all, was her place, that stood for much more than the sentimental description she had written, and no one, not even him, could share that with her.

The poet’s grave that stood magnanimously in the cemetery’s centre, with roses and violets from local enthusiasts arranged at its base, had never much impressed the young Hester. The way she saw it, the poet may be the most distinguished person ever to be born in the area, but to most he was still an obscure figure hidden behind tired pages of school textbooks. Moreover, the famed poet was to Hester the most obscene, obvious aspect of the cemetery, the only part they bothered to write about on information boards, the part that made people view her sacred place as some kind of tourist spot. But as Hester grew older, as she became more and more absorbed in her books, as literature became an ever more prominent force in her life, this began to change.

It had started in the old university town, the first place Hester lived after leaving home, with its narrow cobbled streets that seemed to trap you into an alternate reality, and its ancient cathedral which, in contrast to Hester’s tower block-filled city of birth, was still the town’s tallest building. While the lack of visual modernisation might seem grandiose to some, to Hester it was just a reminder that the town’s wealth, prestige and credibility still relied solely on the centuries-old university. The literature course she undertook in that very institution had been a degree of convenience, not because she cared particularly for seminal 19th-century verse, but because she knew it was the course that would leave the most doors open later on. She would read any book, and write any essay, if it meant she would not need to commit herself to a certain path in a hurry; Hester Cunningham always had been afraid of commitment.

Hester read her assigned texts robotically, systematically, without feeling, making notes on the themes and characterisations she needed to, and no more. Until she came across the words of her own local poet…

The gushing biography that preceded the collection of his poetry mentioned the cemetery where he was laid to rest, and Hester sighed at the memory. Sucked into the vacuum of university life, that past year she had only returned home for Christmas and a few brief weekends, and the cemetery she had known so well was a distant recollection. But as she thumbed the pages of the poet's words, she realised she had never really left. For the first time, she saw the cemetery not so much as a physical place, but as a state of being, separated from reality, to which she could return no matter where she was in the world. The poet had felt the same way, she could tell. His poems delved in ways she never could have imagined into this third space, into emotions more pure than those of any ordinary person, triggered by something so mundane as a tree, or a headstone, in Hester's cemetery.

Perhaps, Hester thought, the poet too had had this revelatory moment about the very fundamentals of poetry, of literature. Perhaps he had come across it as he walked through the cemetery where he was later buried. Hester's cemetery. Their cemetery. It occurred to her that the astonishing significance of the cemetery to the poet's verse might be the real reason that the two were so closely associated, regardless of where his grave lay.

Hester soon saw that she was not alone in the way she saw her cemetery as much more than a graveyard, and that such emotional connections with people, places, things, were what made writers want to write, and people who loved literature want to read. Almost overnight, she started to read her assigned mediaeval love poetry and modernist fiction not just to achieve the grades she needed to graduate, but to experience the authors' own pure, third spaces. The years carried on, her university dissertation was published and widely praised for its "fresh approach to established ideas", and Hester Cunningham slowly began to devote her life to literature.

Hester travelled the world teaching the subject she loved; literature consumed her, sometimes at the expense of her friendships with Scarlett and Lena, and of any lingering hope of a romantic relationship, but she did not mind. Over the years she lectured in some of the world's finest literary establishments; she occasionally led writing workshops, and struggled through painful poetry about death by countless angsty teenagers; she even took a year's sabbatical to finally visit her mother's home country, a land whose rugged mountain ranges seemed to sprawl on for all eternity, and where she learnt amongst other things that her name in their native language meant "star". But whenever she could spare a weekend to return home, she would always take the train from the airport to the cemetery immediately, and remember how this place had helped her discover what motivated poets, and more importantly the form she wanted her adult life to take. Of course, her heart never left the cemetery any more, but when she returned in person, she would always leave a bunch of violets at the famous poet's grave. She had turned into the literary buffs she had so abhorred, but that was no bad thing.

Hester now sat on her favourite bench in the cemetery, reflecting. She had certainly played a great many roles in her life. The mediator of childhood disputes, the misguided lover, the woman of the written word, and now, after the dust of her youth had settled, an elderly person at peace; this could be the opera of her life, in four parts. And the cemetery was the permanent backdrop.

The cat that was her boon companion in old age curled up deeper into her lap. He was a docile thing, but always content, just as she had become in the decade since she had retired. A document concerning the settlement of her will lay beside her. It had come to that time, and while her lack of children or other immediate family made the financial decisions rather simple, she now had to choose her place of burial.

The cemetery had not been in use since the late 19th century, when the city's tuberculosis epidemic had filled it up, so Hester could eliminate her most obvious option. Besides, the poet himself was buried in the cemetery, and Hester, while she had come to attain considerable influence in literary circles, felt it wrong to claim any of the same prestige as the man who had become her hero. However, she did not care for ostentatious headstones, and for her to feel as close to the cemetery in death as she had in life, there seemed to be no alternative but for her cremated remains to be scattered under the gnarled oaks.

The authorities continued to protest, for no one before Hester had ever proposed such a thing in the cemetery. But Hester had read every leaflet from the local funeral parlour, and heeded their advice. They recommended a resting place close to her loved ones; literature had become the love of her life, and the cemetery had been instrumental to her discovering her love. She should choose a place close to home, they said; wherever she may have been in the world, the cemetery had always been her home, ever since early childhood. Her resting place should apparently be somewhere safe and calm; she had always referred to her cemetery as a sort of sanctuary. Was it too much to ask, to be afforded the same kind of protection beyond the grave?

Hester ticked the box labelled "cremation", and wrote the cemetery's name in the space below. Afterwards, however, she put the form aside, stroked her cat, and admired the colours of the leaves: Autumn had always been her favourite season to spend here. Hester Cunningham may always have been both inspired and comforted by a cemetery, of all places, but that did not change the fact that life was worth far more than death, even when the latter was so near.