lush

by

When I was eight I thought I wanted to be a botanist—it was science without blood or flat lines or digging up dirt; mostly I just didn't want to dissect frogs because who knew what pain their tiny hearts could feel? I thought, I would study flowers. I would surround myself with greenery and lift my face to the sun's rays every morning, as if I had leaves and branches instead of arms that don't always embrace the right things and hands that do not always want to help. I planned to find ways to make things bloom. If everything sprouts in its own time then perhaps there was a way to make that time come sooner. Perhaps there was a way to weed out the glum gray of disappointment, the sharp thorns crowning most things that seem perfect and divine. Perhaps there was a way to crush the petals of every happy day, bottle the essence into a light perfume that people can wear when their evenings are wilting and their nights are spent trying to drink from dry soil. When I was eight I thought I wanted to be a botanist, but now I am twenty-seven and sowing sentences, words carefully trimmed. Here is life. Here is life after all. Here is touch. Here are roots. Here are open fields and secret gardens. This is lush. This is plenty. We are all planted, and we are all grown.