dirt

At four years old I decided I wanted to grow a flower. My dad pulled the package from the top shelf I could not reach, a pink tulip promised to me for only a couple dollars. At least, that’s how I remember it. I can picture the bulb, just shy of a perfect circle. The color of burnt brown sugar, uneven hues, and still smooth to the touch. I rolled it around my palm trying to figure out which end the flower would bloom from so I knew how to bury it.

The elephant pot sat outside my house. Clay and smiling, rigid and set into its ways.  It still sits there, as far as I know. A staring contest between me and it when I sit in the front lawn. And if I stare long enough, sometimes I can convince myself I see the dirt threatening to part, something just shy of breaking the surface.

I cannot remember if I dug with my hands or a shovel but I buried it with my hands. I was scared to put in all the dirt, fearing a tulip could be claustrophobic. If everything is held so tightly together, where is there room to bloom? But what did I know. Enough water to be hydrated but not so much to drown. The happy medium must exist somewhere with certainty. 

But certainty moves on a sliding scale and it's hard to imagine that I truly held onto all these considerations with everything I buried

A lot changes with rotations and now I spend a lot of my time feeling dizzy. The time of year where it is cold in the sun and colder at night and part of the work week is getting out of bed early enough to defrost your car. Sometimes it snows and every drive feels like a pending accident, but that all happens later.

After I planted the flower, I wanted a pet hermit crab. And I wanted a pet lizard. And I told my mom I wanted to be an author and I continuously painted renditions of the Starry Night because it was the most beautiful thing I could think of when I was six.

I got the hermit crab and lost him to a circumstance dubbed the circle of life. And if I could calculate the circumference I’d wonder what a mathematician would make of the value. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away and what am I supposed to do with his cage now? A home for something no longer living and my heart utterly broken. I wept to my grandmother, lamenting how to make a sense of a world where the one living thing that understood me could be taken away. She said it would be okay and I wished it would. Because in life things pass just as seconds do, and minutes, and years, but you always carry a piece of it forward. And I wonder if I still believe this.

I buried the hermit crab in my backyard shortly after his passing. I painted a seashell as a tombstone, a child’s crude rendition of the axiom “rest in peace” and said a prayer as I was raised to do. Up to that point, I did not know the deep well of tears the human body possessed - and I did not know there was a point where they inevitably ran out.

I asked my grandmother what happens to him once he is under the dirt. She told me not to worry, think of it as a blanket and think about how good it feels to rest after a long day. And I thought about that little seed and wondered why it suddenly felt so different to consider the dirt.

And I never got a pet lizard, my grandmother passed, and I ceased to paint the Starry Night, and I decided that I would not be an author and it was time to grow up. 

The older we get, the less of the Earth is just dirt and the more of it seems to be something we miss.

At some point, it became impossible for me to articulate anything. My neck hurt from poor posture and I could not look anyone in the eye. That is, every conversation involved a barely perceptible tilt to my head and just enough strain to see straight through anyone. And people loved to talk to me then.

At ten, my friend and I would bike to the woods. An alternative world where homes were strung together by leaves and sticks, dependent on the architectural skill set of young girls. We shaped bows and arrows, waded through the creek, climbed hunting towers despite strictly prohibitive signs because this world was all ours.

In the summer, the sun’s rays bounced shallowly off the lake so that the surface was warm but the rest remained chilled. Close to the shore, the repetitive lapping of barely perceptible waves created a smooth mixture of sand and dirt. At ten years old, we were still inclined to learn the world through feeling, and me and my friend would spend hours by the water playing in the dirt. Our hands coated in mud one second then pristinely eroded by the water the next, a day loops by before you know it and cell phones are yet to be in our back pockets. 

Of course, to see a forest as pure idyllic childhood is to be caught in delusion, and one day my friend and I stumbled across a deer carcass on the river’s bank. At ten years old, I realized there are some things you just cannot look away from. My friend likened it to a car accident, I remarked on the smell. We discussed possible explanations but reached no conclusions. I wondered if there was something evil in us for not looking away.

On the ride home I asked if she had ever tried to grow something of her own. She said her dad bought her flowers after a dance recital and she kept them in a vase in her kitchen. She said she added water everyday but they never got taller and eventually wilted. She said she was four at the time, but she would not bother to do that now.

We went back again and again and eventually the deer was gone but the dirt remained. When I would come back home, I’d walk by the elephant pot with neglect. It can’t be stunted growth if I’m still pacing myself.

My cat is a poor killer, but he’s still one. When my cat began to kill, my sister was upset with him. We told her it was in his nature, what are we to do with an animal? But that didn’t help. He still shouldn’t do that. And at what point is a living thing expected to understand the consequences to its actions?

I thought it didn’t bother me much but I would go to bed often with a headache. I would close my eyes and embrace the dull gnawing just behind them for some time before I inevitably opted for an advil to quell me. One night, though, exhaustion superseded the ache and I fell asleep without chemical aid. That’s when I saw it - a mountain upon our front lawn of all the mice and birds my cat had killed, the dead slouching towards Bethlehem in front of the house I slept in. 

I woke abruptly, feeling terribly cold, to see that my blankets had been scattered on the floor and my cat rested, situated at the end of my bed. I stared at him, and he stared at me, and we both stared but it didn’t feel as though any signals were passing. He eventually stood up and stretched forwards then back, then made his way up to me. In the haze of stolen sleep, I felt a pathetic diatribe rising to the tip of my tongue as he approached me, a Catholic desire to hear repentance. But my cat rubbed his face gently against me then leaped to the floor, clearly eager to go outside at this point, and patiently waiting to oblige him. So I walked down the stairs with him, and let him out the front door where the rising dawn hid behind the morning mist. I watched him slink further away, the mist consuming him while the dirt consumed the mist and the ground laid perfectly flat. And I had to go back to bed then. 

My sister moved out and my cat still sleeps on her bed from time to time. When I talk to myself, I see his ears twitch and wonder what he makes of my habits.

We don’t always hurt each other with malice, and some pain dissolves while other pain erodes, and some pain sits deep like a seed that never grows.

I sat in class and took notes on the polarity of water molecules. Positive one end, negative the other. Actually, miscalculation, because there are no perfect opposites. The directions we grow out in repel and attract to each other, and sometimes you bump into someone else.

Because I fell in love at sixteen, I learned that it doesn’t have to last. But I wish someone would have talked to me about where we bury love long gone. Do you grow out of it, or around it, or do we find it passes but never dissolves?

In class, I learned the difference between organic and inorganic chemistry. A molecular difference, whether or not a compound contains carbon. Carbon makes up eighteen percent of the human mass and healthy topsoil is rich in carbon compounds. I would sit outside and watch my dog dig up the dirt. Our lawn was littered with pointless holes and sometimes I’d brush the lightest layer of dust with my foot into those holes. Exercises in futility.

My heart broke in a parking lot two separate times in the span of a year. Same reason, different parking lots. Whether I actually did or not, I remember crumbling to the asphalt feeling indiscernible from the bits of asphalt broken off of the foundation. The exothermic reaction of a connection dissipating, feeling unsure of my makeup at this point.

I should have started a garden that year, but I kicked up dirt around my backyard and wondered why instead.

At nineteen, my friends and I brought in the New Year around a bonfire. Shivering and incompetent, we could barely keep the fire going despite my friend’s dad continually providing her newspaper to toss into the flames. No use remembering old news. It was more of a wait-out than a celebration, eager to get to the next year so we could stop freezing.

There was a moment of silence and I started to think about the day. I had filled my gas a few hours earlier. So I told them that I had a full tank of gasoline in front of the house. Maybe that could help keep us warm. Slight chuckles but it was barely past eleven pm. We kept waiting it out.

The new year came and we all hugged in celebration, eager to go to our cars and leave the cold night behind. Standing in the embrace, I felt the overwhelming tug of Earth’s gravity. It felt like a perversion of the rules for it no longer felt like enough that my feet were pulled to the ground - the rest of my limbs yearned to resolve to the dirt below us. But the night was over, so how could I explain that to anyone - or ask if they felt it too?

A sluggish journey from my friend’s yard to my car parked next to the curb, my mind returned to the gasoline in the tank. Manually unlocking the door and twisting the ignition, I thought about how little I knew about the mechanics at work; I think a spark got the engine started though I was unsure why there was never combustion. 

Despite the minimal drive home, I opted to wait for the car to warm. At least, I operated under the guise of choice. In truth, all the weight of my left foot sat firmly on the clutch, while the weight of my right foot dominated the break. The full power of the engine seemed to traverse through the entire car, up from the brake to my feet, a low buzz provoking the mind. Each second the car sat idle with the engine on was another second I could not explain. A car with over one hundred and fifty thousand miles racked up, each powered by gasoline, and I wondered why I had never once gone up in flames.

I was taken out of my mind when my friend knocked on the driver’s window. I rolled it down and he asked if I was okay because he noticed I had just been sitting there. The car was warm by then and I could have been home a solid ten minutes before. I nodded and said I was just thinking. I wouldn’t look at him. I pursed my lips together, tensed up my whole body, as my eyes began to sting with burgeoning tears. Human will could not overcome an unexplained eruption, though, and I released all my breath and convulsed over the wheel.

I’m worried I am becoming the kind of person no one wanted me to be.

So much poured out, a stream of purposeless energy, and he stood and listened to it all. Eventually I fell silent, the convulsions ceased; like a river returning to its peaceful stream after the storm had passed, though you still notice the broken branches and muddy banks surrounding. Sometimes all there is to say to a friend is “I’m sorry.”

Eventually, I made the drive home. My front lawn still decorated by scattered patches of snow that refuse to melt, my steps still weary and my body showing somatic exhaustion. I slept for twelve hours and went out some time the following afternoon when it was upsettingly warm for the start of the year. More of the snow had melted, sunk into the dirt. I went to my car to drive for coffee. Barely a dent in the gasoline tank.

At twenty-two, I noticed it rained much more than usual. A friend and I were caught among a storm driving on the highway. I could feel my anxiety peaking as a mile passed then another and the road gradually seemed darker. It was both night and winter and I have always struggled with the fear that my vision would leave me when it was so integral to another’s survival. I asked her if the road looked darker now to her as well, and she confirmed that it wasn’t me but simple darkness.

We had graduated from college seven months early and were both attempting new footing back at home. We went back and forth with what it felt like to be back at home while I tried to quell my mind that the darkness on the road was not my own making. Nearing the exit, we hit a point of shared struggle - why do we lament when others do not meet the needs we make known?

I got back to my house and she returned to her car to finish her trip home. I sat with the question, though, as I got ready for bed. I considered how tensely I slept and remembered the mocking responses many had when I groaned about my jaw pain. Yet I was the only one grinding my teeth at night, the only one holding her body so tight as though to keep any part from drifting away, that triggered all the discomfort. Because it hurt to eat, because my mouth felt stiff and stuck, because I could not speak earnestly about how I felt, how could I resolve this through unspoken expectations of another?

I laid in my bed and stared at the ceiling fan. I felt repetitive, the same aches surging through the same bones at predictable intervals. Twisting ankles and wrists, I wondered how often I had fallen short of expectations no one told me they had of me. My mind traced each shortcoming that arose and found a way to displace blame. I felt like I was sinking deeper into the mattress with each denial. I did not make it so dark outside, did I?

But when I woke up, I still felt unsatisfied. I could barely will myself out of bed, every muscle craved stillness. And my jaw continually echoed the same pain, the inability to let it go.

I went out to the front yard, bare foot, and walked across the grass. The ground was still cold but it would be spring soon enough. I stared up at the sky, then down out my feet, then turned to face the house again. Off to the left, the elephant pot sat. I approached it for the first time in years. I dug a couple inches into the dirt but of course found nothing, so I knelt before it and offered my sincerest apologies.

I can change.