It’s mid-afternoon and you’re coming out of Woolsey Hall. Maybe you’ve just had a late lunch at Commons or maybe, like me, you’re coming out of a mandatory student safety lecture on your third day of college. You exit Woolsey the ugly way—away from the Hewitt Quadrangle, forgoing the whimsical charm of Alexander Calder’s “Gallows and Lollipops” sculpture and resisting Beinecke’s bibliophilic siren song—and cross the street. Walk a block to your left and you’ll end up standing before the great entrance of the Grove Street Cemetery. You can’t miss it: it’s the giant brownstone gate comprised of two monolithic exterior columns and two clustered lotus interior columns, all connected at a top by a slab bearing the epigraph “THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED.” Even without being able to see it (for surely some poor pledges of whatever frat or society have been led blindfolded to the cemetery some fateful initiation night), you’ll know it by the chill in your bones: the cemetery smells like winter even in the swelter of late August.

Here I spent one peaceful hour when the living had gotten a little loud for my taste. I basked in the vastness, the silence, the solitude. Or the near-solitude: at one point, when I had reached the back of the cemetery, I made eye contact with a woman in a bathrobe staring out a window of the hideously looming Yale Health building. It was an uncomfortable interruption. Mostly there was only the dead and me.

Perhaps I tend to romanticize. At the cemetery, I listened start-to-finish to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, an album ostensibly about being in love with Anne Frank but really about the way our love and souls can transcend time, reason, and, fittingly, mortality. I looked around and imagined the cemetery’s residents were my nonjudgmental friends. But the dead are no better than us. I mean, towards the center of the cemetery were these grandiose graves featuring spires and sculptures and even, in one particularly questionable case, sphinxes. At the cemetery’s periphery were mostly short and modest graves with sparse ornamentation. I wonder if the latter roll their empty eye sockets at the old money men entombed in great shrines? Even the dead have to deal with economic inequality.

I’m sure if you do the math it works out, but I can never quite believe that an hour is made of 60 minutes, nor that a day is made of 24 hours. Time is much too elusive for all that. After all, days when I have nothing to do stretch out far beyond my grasp and days when I have all too much to do are over as soon as they begin. And when I go home, months haven’t passed since I was last there: time just picks up where I left it.

I’ve seen photographs of the cemetery’s iconic gate, taken in 1865. They’re black and white, the streets aren’t paved, where today there is a “no parking” sign there is instead an apparently oil-burning lamppost. Right as you walk in, where today there is a small chapel that functions as a main office, there is only an impossible to make out sign standing in shadows. You could almost have me believing that this photo was taken 150 years ago. But then I see that familiar gate. This photo, too, was taken yesterday.

Okay, so you’re onto me. Maybe I am a little bit afraid of time, given my denial of its passage. And shouldn’t I be? Time carries all sorts of unpleasant things: deadlines and bills and so many more trivial distresses. And those responsibilities will just keep coming, taking away from the things I love—reflection, beauty, and so forth—until we’re dead.

So what is fear of time, you may think, but a repressive compartmentalizer’s fear of death? But that’s silly, for death doesn’t alleviate the trifles of time. After all, in 1956, the Grove Street Cemetery’s president wrote living relatives of its residents asking for further payments on already bought lots so the cemetery could keep up with inflation. No, even the dead can’t escape paying rent.

Here’s another treacherous little thing time can do: Let’s say you’ve been having an overwhelming few days. Perhaps you’ve been urged into countless micromanaged social mixers and ushered from mandatory lecture to mandatory lecture. Perhaps it’s your first three days of college and balancing all the activity with all the already noisy expectations in your head is a bit much for you. Perhaps it’s been longer than this—maybe before starting college you were on an overwhelmingly busy and tense family vacation and then a physically and emotionally exhausting pre-orientation wilderness trip. And let’s say you finally get a moment to yourself. You find a quiet cemetery, stroll around, listen to your favorite album, and revel in feeling more mental clarity than you have in weeks. And let’s say this moment is so incredibly, divinely peaceful, perhaps because you are romanticizing again, that you feel it could go on forever. But then, in the heat of your reverie, a man on a bicycle passes by and says something that at first you can’t make out, but it sounds directive. You have to ask him a couple times what he said, finally taking your earbuds out. It’s closing time. Apparently the cemetery closes at four o’clock. And you are thrust, insufficiently resurfaced, back into your world. Being a girl I’ve never had to contend with blue balls, but this must be the spiritual equivalent.

I’ve tried many times over to come to the conclusion here that I was wrong about time, that there’s no fear in replacing the great evergreens that once surrounded the cemetery with a smog-spewing power plant, that the passage of time must be as beautiful as anything else in our universe. I tried at first to believe that the passage of time was an illusion dreamed up for organizational convenience. When this failed, I sought beauty in ephemerality but could find none. I even tried to convince myself that the version of me who was afraid of deadlines and aging was a silly past self, that I’d since come to regard time as my friend. But this would be a lie. I’ll never regard the future nor even the past with anything near the love I feel for the present.

In the cemetery, I kept to the walkways for fear of disturbing my quiescent companions with the thunder of my footsteps. Yet upon leaving I noticed the epigraph above the columns of the gate. I translated it to myself: No rest for the weary. And so, while we are young—and, mind you, so long as I’m alive I will consider myself young by disjunctive syllogism—let’s appreciate the beauty, right fucking now.