the ashes; the garden.

When you’re little, you can close your eyes to reality. Hiding is simple. You duck your head under the blanket–and though you feel the air grow warm and stale with each breath you take–you still choose that over the monsters you’re sure are in the closet.

The monsters your parents assure you do not exist.

But then they leave and you’re alone and you’re afraid.

Fast forward to now. You’re an adult. Or at least that’s what people refer to you as because you pay bills now. You eat noodles for dinner more often than not because you pay bills now. The monsters you were so afraid of as a child? Well, your parents were right.

Partly, I mean.

Because, true: they weren’t in your closet. God, you wish they were. And you wish they looked like monsters. You wouldn’t have gotten close to someone with fangs and talons and tufts of hair in odd places. Especially if he’d lived in your closet.

But the monsters did exist. DO. The monsters do exist. They are magicians of extraordinary skills. They dangle hope, you grasp it; they say abracadrabra! and you open your palms to ashes.

Those ashes can grow a whole garden, you’re told. Sprinkle them everywhere you go–you’ll see, they say. But you don’t want an effing garden. You want what the magician promised. And then you waste what is not even able to be bought, not with all the money and fine things in the world: time. You waste your precious time looking for this magician. He is the white rabbit and you are Alice; you follow him down a hole that widens your eyes, but no longer with innocence.

You are shocked.

And now you feel out of time. Now you feel lost, having followed that white rabbit down the hole and seen strange and terrifying things. But you still have the ashes.

And finally, you start to do it. You sprinkle the world with your ashes. You wonder what kind of garden a heart grows; you wonder if the earth knows that is what it’s receiving: tiny pieces of your heart. All the words he told you; the full ones before you knew; the empty ones after you found out. The vast and dead landscape of your life NOW. Now that he left. Now that he also left. Now that your dreams even left.

Oh, God.

You are Dorothy, but they got it wrong. Because, see, you started in Oz; you lived in color–you never imagined there were places that had none. Not until the tornado picked you up and dropped you squarely in the grainy black and white world of a 1950′s television. And there is your family, your friends, staring at you in that box. They don’t know how to get you out; but they mouth words to you about being strong. About scattering your ashes. About redemption and better things to come.

They are whispering secrets to the deaf. They are talking about Oz to someone who lives in Kansas. They are crazy; they are hope.

And you listen; you scatter your ashes. Even when some starts telling you the ashes are all gone now. Shhhh, don’t talk about it!  Shhhh, don’t sing about it! But they don’t know that you can still feel the ashes when you go to bed at night. You feel them on your palms; they dirty your cheeks as you wipe away your tears.

And now, there is a garden. And it’s beautiful, you must admit. You cannot believe how beautiful it is. And it’s made by a much kinder and truer Magician than the others that you have known. But every once in a while you still see traces of the ashes. You still sing about them. They still take your breath away while you’re doing nothing more emotionally taxing than waiting for the A train. The ashes come in a flash and you’re waiting for the A train, yes, but you’re also listening to him tell you that he’s leaving. You’re also being told no to this particular dream. You’re also waking up alone.

It’s a powerful thing that these ashes do.

And now I see that the ashes and the garden are so inextricably connected, it’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins. And maybe I will never forget the ashes; and maybe that’s how it should be. The ashes are real; the garden is real; somehow I live in a world where they coexist.

The ashes and the garden.

Together.