Content warning:
Show warnings
1. The Scent of Other People’s Memories
You often walk through the Garden of Unfinished Poems, but you’ve never tarried there. It is a place for abandoning, for releasing the remnants of feelings unable to be processed, the ones stuck in perpetual limbo, too painful or confusing to lock into the coherency of words. There’s nothing to be retrieved, so what would be the point in lingering?
So you tell yourself until today, when you spin around after hurling a few lines of romantic verse under the willow tree only to find your momentum arrested by a heady scent, dark and choral. It smells of déjà vu, lives unlived but experienced all the same. Staggering under the weight, you fall to your knees, surprised by the softness beneath them. The ground where you’d left haltering thoughts about your father is no longer barren. Your fingers lightly graze a field of clover, deepening the heady scent, giving flashes of moments—a bark of laughter, a cry of welcome, a growl of disapproval. You linger on the hug that someone else received, letting it seep into the space you hadn’t known its absence had left.
You find one with four leaves. Gently breaking the stem, you hold it up against the setting sun and take in its contours. How had something so gracefully curved come from your jagged attempts to memorialize the events your father no longer could? As his stories faltered, became repetitive, and eventually failed him, your questions sliced ever more frantically across the blank page, slashes through a veil that revealed only darkness beneath.
Lifting the clover to your nose, you breathe deeply of incense and mourning, the creeping grief of losing someone while still holding his hand. But the scent is layered, as well; more hands held, arms clasped, a community gathering around loss and finding something there, in the darkness revealed between slashes of grief.
You tuck the clover in the pocket that used to hold your verses, for now. Later, you’ll tuck it into your father’s, watch as his twitches ease and his breathing settles.
2. The Honey of Playfulness
This time, you let your guard down slightly. The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate. It turned out clumsy and haphazard, all tangled threads and loose ends. Your ex couldn’t perceive you as a whole, and perhaps you can’t either. You may as well abandon the attempts. The point of the garden is to not think, not feel, not reckon with the words you can no longer stand to struggle over.
Still, even as you carry the words to release them, you experiment with movement. Why is it called beelining, you wonder, when bees more seem to frolic through the air? Your straight, measured steps begin to soften, fall lighter, meander along the path. The buzz of a bee joins you, and you mimic its movement. Lilting along, distracted by the game, you follow the bee all the way to a hive you’d never before noticed. It’s inside a hollow tree. Ah yes. You’d nearly forgotten how long you’d been coming here. You place your hand against the tree, and can almost hear the echoes of your teenage voice singing along with your awkward attempts at guitar.
Your hand comes away sticky. The tree grown from your teenage angst must have died long ago—your attempts to make something solid and presentable of yourself clearly failed—but it’s become a haven for something sweet. You lick the palm of your hand, letting the liquid coat your tongue. It tastes of silliness and imagination, putting on and taking off, laughter and ease. There’s something in the honey that beckons a different kind of release. You realize you haven’t even taken the poetry out of your pocket. Your hand is too sticky to do so now. Perhaps these lines aren’t done anyway. Perhaps there’s more to play with in them.
Perhaps there’s more to play with in you.
The bees dance invitingly, and you carefully reach in and break a small part of the comb to bring home with you.
3. A Salve, for Lovers Lost
You find yourself coming to the garden more, but leaving less. At first you keep the words longer to play with them, having fun with rhyme and reason, but eventually it morphs into something different. Something that feels more like searching than playing, something that wants to be right instead of simply beautiful. Today when you enter the garden, your pocket is full to bursting with lines you can’t let go of. They’re not perfect yet.
You came to release one, just one, a minor heartbreak there’s no use in dwelling on. But as you reach the willow and lift it from the top of your pocket, you’re startled by a bunny suddenly leaping out from behind the tree. There’s never anyone else here, any life other than the bees! You stumble in surprise, loosing the whole pile of papers stuffed within your pocket, and scraping your behind on the dirt path. The wind catches the scraps, blowing them willy-nilly, disrupting your careful system of where each type of verse should be laid to rest. What have you done?
You place your hand against the trunk to hoist yourself up, and a piece of bark comes off in your grasp. It feels soothing against your palm, seeping sensations that ease into your skin—the lightheartedness of new love, slick sweat and racing heartbeats, coy glances and eyes rolling back in pleasure, a hitched breath. It feels of loss and breaking, and the way your heart became something more in the aftermath—fuller, deeper, resonant.
You gather more bark ready to release itself from the trunk and take it home to make a salve to slather over your still-beating heart.
4. The Mushrooms Grown from Past Versions of You
You start to have a sense of which poems need further experimentation and which you’re ready to release. But you’ve lost all sense of order in the garden; since the wind spread your work far and wide, the garden has become wild and lush. You move carefully down the overgrown path, avoiding the poison ivy and pushing through bushes. It’s more humid than you remember, and the ground is softer beneath your feet.
You bend to tuck some lines of longing under a fallen log, not ready to face the forms your desire is taking for fear that they might be impossible—a family that embraces you fully and without hesitation, a body that moves fluidly among expressions and expectations, a lover that dances with you, just as fluidly, just as fully, through thick and thin.
From your crouched position, a whole world is revealed. Crickets chirp, a fly flits past your ear, a bunny—perhaps the one you spied earlier—nibbles in the field of clover, and mushrooms spread like a whisper through the quiet wood. Now that you’re looking for them, you see the mushrooms everywhere, in every damp hollow and shady space. You carefully dig under the roots of one, curious what enables their growth. Then another. Then another. Under each, you find who you used to be, shades of yourself that you’d thought dead and gone, left behind. Shades that you thought you could never stomach.
You lift one of the mushrooms to your lips and take a gentle bite. It’s savory: not just edible but bursting with sustenance. Tracing the fungal network across the garden, you see the ways it connects everything—living and dead, past and future, possible and impossible. Leaving these poems unfinished wasn’t only to let them die, but to let you continue to live.
5. A Lily, for Your Love
You didn’t come to release anything, this time. You came to offer thanks. To tell the garden how grateful you are, for the space of release, for the possibilities of play, for what can be found in relation.
You’ve been in a season where you haven’t needed to release things in order for them to grow. You’ve found words that can hold the bittersweet pairing of hugs you never received from the hand you still have the chance to clasp. Phrasing that glides between gendered glimpses without halting their flow, finding fullness in the movement. Language full of love for the stilted selves that blossomed into you. A smile tugs at the corners of your mouth, irresistible. You’ve also composed the first lyrics since your high school variety show days, inspired by someone who blew into your life with the kind of love you’d never believed it possible to imagine, a love that continues to grow even if your words sometimes falter, or your melody sputters to a stop. Together, you create space for it to start again.
The wind seems to nudge you, guiding you back towards the willow tree where you’d so often buried the pieces of your heart after another that found them too heavy to hold. And there, growing at the base of a tree, is a single orange lily. Bright, with desire. Full, with potential. And dancing, fluidly, in the breeze.
You smile, offering the garden one last breathless thanks, as you pluck the lily from the garden that now teems with life, and bring it home to your love.
Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.
Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Comments (0)