I Can’t Bloom Where I Was Planted

On growing new roots and rising above early trauma.

“All good things are wild and free.”

Today I sit crosslegged on my balcony in Queens and try to create some semblance of jungle from this concrete slab. Like a kid, I dig up big fistfuls of earthy potting soil with my fingers. Some sprinkles down, staining my legs and caking brown underneath my fingernails. I love to be this messy on purpose.

I bring the dirt up to my face in a heaping handful. I inhale it. It smells like earthworms crawling out in the rain. It fills me like freshly cut suburban grass on summer break, or the springtime hiking trails along the Mississippi River.



This smell transports me back to a different time, as many sensations do with my PTSD. The dirt smells like Dad throwing a baseball across the front lawn. It’s Mom perched with a spade and a fresh armful of pink and purple hydrangeas from the Saturday farmers’ market. The smell is suddenly every moment I was outside of the houses that frightened me. It’s me letting nature envelop me in a gentle hug, endlessly loving, one I needed desperately.

I know nothing about caring for plants. But I’ve been learning something about caring for me.

I’m learning to listen to the little voice inside of me that says I want that or This would be delightful. Some days the voice only wants a warm swig of matcha steaming from a porcelain mug. On other days, it demands a big, grieving cry under soft covers in the dark. Yesterday it wanted (and got) a balcony full of friends singing Happy Birthday over a gooey cookie cake and ice cream. I held a house candle between my palms and blew it out — the child and the adult entwined, smiling. Another year successfully older, but still learning to be the six-year-old, the wily teenager, the developmentally arrested young adult.

Growth is on my mind. Today, the little voice says plants and my thumb suddenly itches green.