True Love, Lost

I go out to the garden and there isn't much there, but houses beyond houses beyond houses, all close together and more than I can count. It makes me thirst for something. I'm not starving for it. It isn't a constant pain, not an insatiable, passionate hunger. It's a discomfort I'm used to ignoring, and I will spend weeks wondering why my head hurts and my body hurts without ever knowing just a glass more could fix it. I wish water could fix this.

It's springtime, and the snow is still melting in dirty piles by the curb. People love the springtime, I think, but they always forget about this part of it when the leaves on the trees are tiny red buds and the daffodils are green shoots just barely forcing through the soil. They call this part winter and do that whole season a disservice because spring is supposed to be pretty, and this part is not. I always wondered why winter was so easily hated. It's almost like people want to hate it. I don't really hate anything, although I do still thirst.

It's warm enough for me, anyway, and so I set myself down on the ground, with the knees of my jeans slowly soaking into the dark wet soil, and my bare palms pressed deep into the yellow grass that hasn't quite come back yet. I dig holes with my spade and my fingers, and press my tulip bulbs in one after the other while the sun sets.

I think I do a lot of this wrong. I think gardening asks you to wear gloves and use tools and start in the morning. I don't sleep well. It takes me all day to sleep, so I start at sunset when I can feel the cool breeze come in. I like the feel of dirt under my nails. When I was little, I would press dirt under my nails and clean it off with a hard-bristled brush shaped like a toad that we kept in the bathroom, because I liked the feeling and I liked the toad. After that I would press soap into my nails before I went out, because my mom told me that's what archeologists did to keep their nails clean and I wanted to be an archeologist.

I wouldn't mind that I did it all wrong if no one else could see it. I don't mind doing things for myself, because if they're wrong but I do them my way, then they still make me happy. These houses all around me see right over my fence, and the cars pass by and by and by, lined up and down the street on both sides. I wouldn't mind anything at all if I could do it for myself.

My back hurts, but I love tulips. I used to draw them all the time, and paint them and line up the paintings over the fireplace. Every now and then, someone catches me with a pencil in my hand and a tulip on my paper and they tell me I did a good job. Sometimes they even ask me why I stopped drawing. The truth is that I wanted to be an artist, and even worse, I thought that I could. I spent my time on it. I had so many art supplies: drawing books, a digital art tablet, an easel, charcoal pencils, oil crayons, markers, watercolors, acrylic paints. And I used them to draw flowers. I love flowers. When I was a kid I had a coloring book full of flowers and their names, and I would go out into the fields and find them and ask my mom about them, or my grandmother. But art drove me to tears. My head was full of flowers and my hands could never put them down. Looking back, I made amazing things. I could have been a great artist if I had kept going, but when I showed my more talented friends, they were critical, or even worse, surprised. You'd think it'd be better to surprise them, but to me it never seemed like a pleasant surprise. It felt jealous and cold. I showed a friend a picture I had done of a flower with clouds overhead, and all they said was, You did this? I should have kept myself safe from them, but I didn't know they were dangerous. Still, art made me happy, for a while at least. Before I did it for other people.

Tulips are the loveliest flower. The one thing I could never understand is why they were always drawn closed. The golden center of a pansy is called the "spirit". I wonder if that's true for tulips. I wonder too how many people don't know what tulips look like open. Since I moved here I realized that people don't know flowers, or plants, or animals. They know things I don't. They know transactions and transportation, and they know how to seize up a person, but they don't know how to seize up the sky to see if there's rain coming.

I always draw tulips half-open. I always thought they were a little sad like that, and I felt a little sad drawing them, but it was a rare sad, the kind that made me happy. I like tulips that look like flames, red and gold and orange against the blue sky. Gold tulips mean lost love, red tulips mean true love, and so I painted a tulip that meant "true love, lost", blowing in the wind against a blue sky. That was the second flower I painted. The first was at an outdoor art class with my grandmother. We were supposed to paint the little dried up wildflowers they had strewn across the tables, but I liked sunflowers. I painted three of them at dusk, under a purple velvet sky, set off to the left side of the paper so you could see more of the world. It made the instructor angry, because she thought the sky should be blue, but it never occurred to me to make it that way. My grandmother had followed the instructions exactly, and when we got home she propped up her blue-sky poppies in the kitchen and said that she had done a bad job. I looked between hers and mine and decided that we had both done a good job. I know that I'm right, because her painting is still hanging, and so is mine.

I had a talent for making art teachers angry. I took a Chinese brush painting class with my father in a little store in the neighbouring town. I liked to paint furiously fast, one stork after the next, one mountain after the next. It was satisfying. Our little class was kinder to me, and I was only eight and they were all in their thirties, so I think they understood. But I was doing it for me, and not them, so I was happy. Later on I had a teacher who thought I was unoriginal and had an unsteady hand. I was 11 years old. It's funny how when someone thinks something of you, it becomes what you are. I didn't get into the special art program that year, or the next. It took letters and emails from other teachers to get me that slot, in a new school where art was competitive and formulaic. In class I would spend hours drawing a horse skull, and then I would go home and draw a white panther bursting through a cake over the moon. I never understood how to make skulls and vases creative, and so I thought that I must be bad.

After that I started gardening. I did it at night, under the stars, in the cold. I did it while my dog sniffed around me, until my parents called me in. There is no reason not to garden in the dark as far as I understand it. The seeds are covered by dirt anyway, and there are still weeds to pull. To me it makes no difference, except that I have to perch the flashlight between my shoulder and my neck, and that can be uncomfortable. But I don't mind. I love the tulips.

As the night gets too cold for me, I want to stay out to spite it. My arms and face are dirty but the ground is getting hard, and my nails are sore from soap and dirt. All I see is the golden glow of streetlights that never ever end. They go on, row after row, so that there is no darkness.

I think I know what I thirst for.

I remember bathrooms with open windows that brought in a cool breeze as I brushed my hair. I remember fields full of flowers that stretched for miles, and family who loved my paintings and teachers who I could make laugh. Nights full of stars, people full of love, a mind and heart that were full of whims and love and laughter. Pride in flowers, in what I could make, what I could do, pride in me. I remember being free to do things wrong, and being happy to do them anyway. 

Tonight, I lie awake in bed with a familiar, dissatisfied feeling. But my hands smell like soap from a long time ago, and there is a breeze coming through the window, so for the first time in a long, long time, I get up and draw myself some flowers.