Uprooting the Pumpkin
Some of you may have read this on my xanga or in SHS's Muse. This was written a while ago and I only wanted to illustrate it because people have told me it is well written (not because of it's relevence to how I currently feel). The book will be sent to Sweden (for Markus) and currently has 17 illustrations and seven poems/essays. Here is the second essay along with one of it's images.
I really never understood gardeners. They spend their lives tending to their little gardens with the little green plants that fit in neat little rows. It is in the very nature of these plants to be at the brink of death, all the time, and yet gardeners tend to their little gardens, working to stay level - not good, not bad, just alive, with little tomatoes and an eggplant here and there.
And then you have the special plants, the beautiful flowering plants that don the finest colors. Gardeners spend their year working the soil, planting the seeds, caring for the sprouts, tending the bulbs, until one day these tender petals emerge and dip their heads and laugh in the wind. And then, a week later, they are gone.
And it gets me, why a gardener can spend all of his time on this single flower, wasting and worrying, if it is so fragile. And you can ask them. And they'll have the same answer:
because they love it.
So in the end it's really not complicated at all, because when you really love something - and god knows you have no reason to except that you do - it is worth working for, even if it's fragile, and only grows in certain conditions, and is shitty and hard a lot of the time, and makes you cry more often than you used to. Love is the perpetual blindfold. You can just know you love and that is enough, and that is
totally okay,
because it's like a pumpkin patch. And you forget the little pumpkins that have ugly spots and misshapen heads. They twist and break off; they are insignificant. And then you have this single pumpkin. And it is this orange that is more than orange, that reminds you of my sweater. And it is so full of you that the bad memories are suddenly good memories, and you know that you can love that you hate them.
And I'm not saying it's easy, because it's not. It's nothing like easy. In fact, "easy" will be scratched from the lexicon. Red marker.
If you're anything like me, you'll collapse on a bench in the rain and cry really, really hard for a while, and then you'll stop, and then you'll start again all day, against doors, and pillows, and especially shoulders. You'll hold your breath and shrug your shoulders in tension when you don't even realize it.
And today is the hardest day to live. I mean, yesterday is the one you regret the most, and tomorrow will just never come when you want it to.
But today, it is so hard. It is so hard. Today, my knees broke. Today, my mouth forgot. Today, I ate next to nothing. Today, I was not ready for today, and I will never be ready for today.
But for me, there is just way too much good that outweighs the bad. That you cannot pretend that love is not there, because it will be there and it will beat when torn and limping. You cannot pretend. You may fear it sometimes, but it is irrelevent compared to love.
And it must be worth it. It really must be worth it.
Worth it to take risks, to live for moments where everything makes sense, for a second, and then doesn't, and then to have someone to make it worse because it must be worse.
And then getting better slowly. I don't know when it's going to be better. I have been afraid to write anything down because somehow, writing it down means giving it up and means it's not going to happen. I am such a superstitious person, but i have to stop believing in it to break it.
Isn't that funny? That you have to stop believing in something to make it stop. I do not believe that this will not work because I wrote about it or because I told someone or because I hoped.
I hope. I'm hoping a lot right now. That i am going to be okay tonight, and tomorrow night. That it gets better. That there will be a day when we will both know it's going to be okay. And that it is
that I don't stop loving.. that I love you.
no.
I mean. I already know that. That last one.
And then I'm at the start. And then I know a pumpkin can grow from this and that Okot P'Bitek is right.
"No leopard
Would change into a hyena,
And the crested crane
Would hate to be changed
Into the bold-headed,
Dung-eating vulture,
The long-necked and graceful giraffe
Cannot become a monkey.
Let no one
Uproot the pumpkin."