Mysterious and Gay

I studied them. I was left wearied by the outstretching of time before them, the excruciating distance between the question and the answer. Some plants would take years just to show me that the plan didn’t work. I hated it. So I tossed away that path like the sad, blackened cactus I had such high hopes for.

Now, with my growing age and deepening compassion, I am the proud owner of thirty-three absolutely living and not dead at all plants. One may even say that they are thriving.

I wish I could say I just put my nose to the grinder and figured it out. Truthfully, I was dragged kicking and screaming into my green thumb. My love for plants grew from the passage of grief like flowers from the grave of my past self. I mourned what I learned I had never had, what I would never receive, and what could have been. I mourned for my younger self, so headlong sprinting into escape that I never noticed the crashing in and around me. Perhaps that was a good thing at the time.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead!”

“No rest for the wicked!”

“No pain, no gain!”

Somewhere during all that kicking and screaming, my foot landed upon solid ground. I looked up for the first time and saw a mirror. In it was a sad plant, desperately trying to survive on the unpredictable floods and droughts of my care.

It’s so easy to forget about a plant, they never say a word. They never thrash out in anguish, screaming “Please! I’m dying!” They exist in quiet solitude, making do with what they’ve been given or dying.

Now, when I look at my plants I see more than a list of tedious or enigmatic needs. I see time. Some plants are bent at odd angles, from times where they were placed in less than ideal light and climbed desperately to reach for the sun. Some grew to such lengths in the summer, the beauty of a condition well met. In the winter they will sleep, dulling their ambition for a time. Everything has its season.

What things I was grateful having stayed the same

I could only think of three things that hadn’t

Grateful or not

I have a game on my phone where I water little plants

I name every single one after you

I can’t bring myself to name a real plant after you

I couldn’t stand to lose you twice

I’m so far from who I was when you were here

I can’t even see the shore

I’m out to sea and the sky is cloudy, my love

I don’t have your star to guide me

So much has changed

And continues to

A phrase keeps ringing in my ears

I don’t know where it came from

But it screams

Then I thought about it more. Sitting on my coffee table and filling up the drawers of every cabinet I own are notebooks. Their contents range from banal to-do lists to big dreams and plans for their execution. Is that not a journal?

Sure, they may not be filled with flowery metaphors and vivid descriptions, but they show a scaffolding. The frame of my life from the view of what needed to be pulled from my brain and put into ink to comprehend.

My notes app has six hundred and eighty one entries. June fourth, a shopping list. July twenty fifth, a poem about being hurt. Last Friday, a confirmation number. I think perhaps I have been documenting this life in grocery lists and unsecured passwords.

People fantasize about strange planets

Unusual fauna

Terrible and vast flora

Inky black swamps

Filled with bioluminescent creatures

That howl and hum in the night

I wonder to myself

What about home?

When you listen

And learn the secrets of your home land

The bend of the creek

The patterns of the fairy flies

Where the sweetest blackberries grow

You soon find it familiar, a friend

And when you leave

The next place as unfamiliar as a strange planet

When the distance is mere miles

So how can one not see the strange beauty

In the infinite little pockets of Earth

With which one becomes intimate