I haven’t watered my plants in way too long, even though I think about them wilting away almost every day /

I think about them with a fresh glass of water sitting beside me and I could give up the relief of my thirst for their parched-ness but instead I sit stuck in time slowed by shame knowing that I am not doing enough to take care of them as my water stales //

It must be vulnerable to be a plant snipped away from your established growth and put into the care of a girl in her late twenties and be told to grow new roots and when you do and you’ve been repotted in clay hanging from the window, you hope she remembers to water you /

when you see so often, her forgetting to water herself //

In science class we learn that 99.9% of our bodies are made up of empty space /

an ever-changing-pattern-of-sub-atomic-forces like the stars above us and it took me way too many years of feeling lost in this echoing space to realize that surrendering to the unease, vulnerability and difficulty of living allows me to feel safe in the liminality of the space within me //

Our atoms were snipped from the cosmos and when we are small and vulnerable we are told to grow roots in soil rotted by greed, extraction and exploitation and we are shouted at to grow and grow and grow, and flower and grow and then we feel all the pain and shame when we are left wilted and shrivelled //

(2024) old roots

And then we sit on our couches and berate ourselves for not being able to water our plants when we ourselves haven’t been watered and allowed to grow in all the directions innate to our own vibrations //

There is so much space within you to find old roots in need of water and grieve dying leaves you never wanted to grow.