Crocus

      The man looks down at his thumb, frowning at the blood that blooms from the cut on the tip. He pulls a Band-Aid from his back pocket and takes his time unwrapping it, taking in how his blood slides down the length of his hand and drips onto the dirt. For a moment, he wonders what his blood will do for the garden – hoping that it will do more for them than it does for his body.

                                              The moment passes.

                                                           He wraps the Band-Aid and covers the bleeding.

                                               Maybe it’ll stop the pain.

           He doesn’t try to think about it for too long, picking his shears up and moving back to cutting down on the overgrowth that has begun to rule over the garden. A laugh bubbles up his throat as the new old song comes up from his phone, a wave of ice-cold memories licking against his legs as he cuts a stem. He watches it fall into the water, the stem being pulled back and forth like his body. Teetering on the edge of something unknowable. Uncalculatable.

           The man wonders about the person he used to know. The one whose name is like the very thing he sits in, the one who grew so wondrously from the ground before being pulled back under its surface. The man can almost see the person kneeling a couple of feet away, the water-like memories kissing their legs as they help maintain the garden with him. They loved the garden.

           They loved so much, didn’t they? It seemed like they did. The garden they were thrown into had its thorn bushes, but the man felt the thorns too. Granted, the thorns weren’t always there for the man – or, maybe it’s more accurate to say the man didn’t feel the thorns all the time. Not like the person did. Garden, for what else is fitting for the person’s name?, used to have moments.

           It would come as they would sit here, much like the man is now as he continues to cut through the colors. Garden’s voice was like that. It was like color. The colors would drip onto the ground around them, their pain crackling with the impact. Maybe it was simply the impact that Garden felt. Was that where he went wrong? Did the man not realize that the release wasn’t that, it was a refocus. Garden’s refocus seemed to help them for some time, almost like replacing soil. Replacing the soul. Wasn’t that something the man was told once? Every seven years or so, the whole body is replaced – the cells that were there seven years ago long-distant memories being pulled into the dark depths. The man felt another laugh bubble through his skin.

                                   Garden would talk like that, too. They would always sound poetic. Or,                                                                                                                                                         try to.

           The man didn’t mind. He thought it was nice. It made Garden them.

                                                           Another stem falls into the water. For some reason,

                                                                                              the water looked purple. Like what

                                                                                              people would paint the universe as.

                                                           Almost the same hue as a crocus.

           He tried to remember Garden’s favorite flower, his eyes scanning the rainbow around him at an attempt to force the answer out of the ground. The water still lapped at his legs as he moved to the nearest color, Garden now sitting on the bench they made together two summers ago.

           ‘Are you sure you even know how to do this?’ The words came out as a laugh, Garden’s eyes glowing with amusement as they looked at him. He tried to think of what he said in response but the words came out muffled. ‘Damn, it was just a joke… Can’t you take one?’ The man remembers the color of Garden’s blood as they winced away the pain. Something had happened with the bench… Did he drop it? No, the blood came from a cut that was already there. Maybe. By that point it was becoming hard to keep track of what cuts were from before and which were more recent.

           ‘You don’t have to stay, you know.’ The man looked up towards where Garden was sitting, the water now above their ankles. He forced a smile and tried to shake his head with as much calm as possible. The garden still had weeds growing throughout it, he couldn’t leave. ‘I promise you; you don’t have to keep coming back.’ Garden smiles and the glow comes back to their eyes for a moment before it's pulled into the depths.

           He had sworn that he would never leave again. Once, Garden had promised the same to him. The man knew it was a lie, even back then. There was no weight to the words Garden spoke. The promise that Garden choked out. God, he was stupid to believe. Even just a little bit. Knowing something is a lie doesn’t make it less painful when the curtain is pulled back. The man still let hope slip in through the cracks of doubt. He still hoped that Garden would be with him years later. His hope even had a minimum number of years, at least three more, it would say to him late at night. Garden will still be here for at least three more years, don’t worry.

           And the man believed. Why wouldn’t he? It was always easier than asking the questions. Asking if the blood that slid down Garden’s arm as they finished putting in the bench was from something new or old. The past soul or the present. Asking if the glow would ever come back to Garden’s eyes.

                                                           Another stem falls into the water.

           The man took a moment to wipe sweat from his forehead as the universe shined down onto the space around him. He thought he could still see Garden out of the corner of his eye but tried to focus on finishing the garden. The water was halfway to his waist now, everything below it numb to the cold. The man grimaced as he pulled a weed out of the ground, dirt mixing into the water as all the roots sprung up in alarm.

           ‘Isn’t it sad?’ He pretended not to hear Garden’s voice from last summer. Sometimes, talking about the real would become too much for him. He felt bad whenever it would be too much; it would always go the same way too. Garden and he would talk for hours about something true. The next day, they would come back with the idea of sparking another hours-long conversation when the man was still recovering from the last one. ‘Doesn’t everything deserve to live?’ The man would pull away with a nod, maybe throw in a smile to try and distract them from any obvious signs, and continue with whatever task he had set for the day.

           Some days, there wouldn’t be any talks like this. There would just be laughter and quiet. The man and Garden’s eyes would be alight with the laughter of seven billion lives, the silence being breathed out of them as they would take in the words that made up one another. The outlines of their names. The sounds of their bodies on each other’s lips. These were the calm days. Garden seemed most like themself.

                                                                                                                                  The man

                                                                                                                                 choked back

                                                                                                                                 a sob as

           the water came up to his waist, Garden moving from the bench. He pulls another weed from the ground, his arms soaked now as he throws the dead thing behind him. There is no sound when it hits the water, if it ever does. The sob slams into another laugh as he remembers the time a weed flew into Garden’s face, dirt covering their shirt. Their face had gotten so red as they glared at the man, two handfuls of dirt flying back towards him before he could apologize.

           The shears cut through the memory as more stems fell to the ground, the man not bothering to wipe his eyes as the water hugged his stomach. God, how much he hated his body. He would spend hours looking at the length of it and wondering what parts needed to be removed, fixed, to get it right. Garden would always dismiss his complaints about his structure, saying something about how they liked him just the way he was. He never really believed them. Now, it feels more like a betrayal than feeling he was right. Though, if they heard him talking like that, their face would probably become serious again. That was the thing about them, their face could switch at the drop of a hat if something with enough force hit them. Their face could become so serious, and did, whenever the man let his self-hatred drip from his teeth. The funny thing was – though, funny probably isn’t the right word – that no matter how serious their face got, their eyes were always dripping with sadness.

           The sheer weight of it in their eyes almost made him cry out a couple of times, but the man always forced himself to hold it back. That was the thing about Garden, it was easy to forget the weight in their eyes when they would glow for so long. Even their soul at the beginning of the year would try to hide it. The man did the same thing though, didn’t he? He would pull away from Garden whenever they would come close to breaking through the cracks. His smiles would have more light to them, his laugh carrying more at the hopes of burying whatever thoughts wanted to break through.

           He cut through more weeds.

           He hoped that the water would go down. Laughed when it didn’t. Bit the inside of his mouth when it rose. Cried when he thought he saw Garden standing under their willow tree. They would do that together. After working on the garden all afternoon, they would find themselves sitting in one another’s arms under the protection of the willow. It was Garden’s favorite tree though the man never thought to ask why. They would read while the man slept in their arms, carefree.

                                  ‘These are my favorite moments.’ Garden’s voice from three months ago

                                               drifted from under the willow, a smile on their lips. ‘I like when

                                               it’s just us in the world. No one else. We don’t have to worry

                                               about time.’

           Of course, the man couldn’t agree more. Even if he never got the chance to voice it back to them. He would give so much to be back in those moments with them. To just be able to lie in the silence of their own making, to not have to worry about the ticking clock. The countdown always going on inside Garden’s head. The man hoped that by promising not to leave, it would be the right wire to cut on the timebomb. It wasn’t. Even now, he couldn’t tell if it was the wrong one either. Did the wire saying that cut make the countdown speed up? Did it slow, even if just a little?

                       The man sighed and looked around himself. The water made it hard to tell how

                       much was left of the garden. He spared a moment to take in the sight of Garden

                       still propped under the willow, their smile like the stars that weighed down on

                       the man’s back.

           It had been a month. He had been continuing to work on the garden for a month without Garden’s presence. Or, maybe that wasn’t accurate. It seemed like Garden was still present in everything the man did. He could hear how they’d laugh at the way the man would manage to get scared by the toaster, even though he had been using one all his life. A month gone and he could still hear them singing something almost all the time, even if just humming along to some random tune.

           Here, they were everywhere. Each speck of dirt held a part of Garden inside it, each piece coming together to make the garden more. More than just a place to go. It made it a home. That’s why they were still under the willow, it’s why the man was the only one who understood Garden’s wishes. He was the only one there in the end, holding Garden’s hand in the pale light. He was the one who saw the glow leave their eyes for the last time.

           The water began to fall away as the man stood up, a smile coming to his lips as he looked out at the work he’s finished. His eyes went over to the gray stone under the willow and his mind hoped that Garden would be happy with his progress.

           ‘You look so pretty like that.’ He put the shears in his back pocket and wiped the dirt from his hands. ‘Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about – you!’ The water hugged his face now as he picked up the pile of weeds. ‘It’s like you’re carrying the sun inside you.’ The man patted the bench as he walked past it, the feeling of Garden’s hand on his kissing his mind as he continued out of the garden.

           ‘Worrying over it will be a waste of time. Just say what you’re thinking and be done with it. Let some of that light out.’

           “I promised I would never leave you, and I never will. I know you didn’t mean it the same way when you said it to me, but that’s okay. You never had to. You told me how you felt every second of the day towards the end, I’m just sorry I couldn’t do the same. I was too scared that saying everything would make the ending real. But it came anyway. It came and now the only way I can say ‘I love you’ is through working on the garden that you loved so much.” The man ran his fingers over the indents in the stone, kissing the top of it before stepping back. He took a breath to steady himself before speaking again. “If I had the sun in me, you held the moon.”

                                               The man turned and walked back towards the house, the pile of

                                               crocuses waving to his back as he walked away.