You Grow Out of Your Garden
After hiking in the wilderness
You run wild in the forest — but then everyone gets cold feet.
Your family howls off in a gale, leaving you alone with your blisters, dreaming of a hot steamy shower.
Flushing with excitement — just thinking about indoor plumbing — you retreat from the wilderness and head for home. Why pine in the forest when you have a 4-star tree house waiting for your return?
Turning the corner into your street
Something is wrong. The neighborhood looks parched, desolate.
Standing beside what was once your garden gate, you gaze into the absence.
It’s gone. The gate. The gargoyles. The mossy garden. The walls hung with ivy. The grass underfoot. The lemon trees laden. Your tree house above. The garden swing below.
All. Gone.
Half-dead weeds wave back at you in distress. Tatterlings of plastic scrape by on the wind.
Stepping over the threshold of loss, you are confused, enraged.
It seems you have misplaced your garden, not your mind
But you check, just in case…
No, you’re in the right place. On the right road. It’s just the wrong reality.
You hate it when that happens.
You rotate on your axis
The same old traffic thunders by, oblivious of your roadside subtraction. Hanging down, the sky crushes your losses into pavement cracks. You spiral down, slowly. Everything eroding. Especially you.
How could this happen? Who deleted your garden? Was it blanket bombed, kidnapped, ploughed into dust? Gardens can’t just disappear overnight.
You slump in and out of confusion
What about Cleaver and Clinger, the guardians? Crouched like gargoyles either side of the gate. They wouldn’t have left without a fight.
You give the sidewalk a quick pat down — grasping at claws, or other tell-tale signs of a garden-ripping. All you can find to hang on to is a crusty candy wrapper. It crackles helplessly in your hand. You release it, fluttering back into despair.
Then miraculously, something green catches your eye
Suspended in an orb above pavement, a miniature garden rotates on its axis. Plucking it out of mid-void, you hold it between your finger and thumb.
Simply. Wondrous.
Bringing it up to your face, you gaze at your Lilliputian reality — into your bonsai world — without you. A self-enclosed garden of Eden. A leafy reduction, compressed in a dew drop of Jade.
You wonder at it
This Jade marble. Complete. Perfection. Except for its size, of course.
Turning the marbeline marvel in your hand, squinting in at your home. You can just make out the rope ladder that leads to the front door of your tree house. You would like to step through that door and take a shower. You are just experiencing some logistical issues.
You wonder about yourself
While you have always had problems with the space-time continuum, you pride yourself on keeping things in proportion. Until now.
Clearly, something is wrong.
Perhaps:
A. Your recent trip to the vast wilderness has blown life out of proportion, making your garden seem tiny by comparison.
Or maybe:
B. You have a serious case of self-aggrandizement.
In which case, this might be the perfect time to feel deflated.
Before you get into a tailspin
She nips you in the bud, which hurts. A lot. In fact, she bites you so hard, you almost lose your marble.
How does she creep up like that? So silently.
Now you come to think about it, you can hear the rest of her herd approaching. Galloping down the roadways, descending in a terrifying clatter of their thundering truths. Stopping traffic. Blaring on the horns of impending dilemmas.
But she is silent
She ran ahead of the herd, which sounds different. Unique. In fact, when you think about it, you have never been bitten by a more unique unicorn, who also makes you want to listen better.
You decide it’s a good time to stop making sense. It’s okay. Nothing else does.
She nips you again, this time on the shoulder. Technically speaking, it feels like a terabyte — which jogs your memory.
‘Dammit,’ you say. ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten how much it can hurt?’
She bites you again — yes, there you go, it can always hurt more.
You sigh, returning her hazel gaze
Leaning on a unicorn shoulder, you rest your head in her mane — it seems like the most logical thing to do, under the circumstances. She lashes you with a doe-eyed blink. In a huff of warm breath, you’re smitten — it’s like face-planting in meadow.
Looking up at the clouds
Hexed by your perplexion, a sandpaper shower of pixels rains down on your cheeks. Brushing your face, rolling you out into droplets.
Images trickle and drip off your nose, seeping you in puddles of color. Everything unpaving, returning from concrete to abstraction.
Pattering down, you run through in a steady stream of alphas and omegas, drumming like fingertips on a keyboard, pelting through letters, showering in symbols, crescending in a leaf-fall of ladders.
You are rolled out in thunder. You are swept up in flash flood, splattering across the void of your thirsting parchment.
You download a garden again
Or garden uplifts you. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference.
Light dapples inside your lids. Lips taste lemon zest. Toes sink in loam. Opening your eyes, leaning against a wall — your garden wall.
Clinger blinks you in through his gateful tears while Cleaver rolls her eyes, until you get over it — the threshold, the gate, into garden again.
It’s good to be home.
You walk down the path, reflecting in puddles
You grew out of the garden — in and out of proportion.
Bite by bite, your improbabilities were irrationed back, as you leaned into unheard. Deflating into breathe.
Surrendering — with a perplexing lack of unicornity, you grew back into garden, again.
Climbing the rope ladder to your door, you take a long shower in pixel-dusted revision. Rewriting yourself.
And vowing
Not to take garden for planted, again.
