sentiments from the garden

in

by Yitzel Serna

dear mr. weed,

i’m writing to send my apologies on your rather hasty removal from my garden this past saturday. 

you were quite beautiful for a moment, your long green runners covered in the smallest white flowers. if they hadn’t known any better they may have left you there in your splendor—and, as most weeds do, you would have grown tremendously in size until the ground of my small garden was covered in the green and white of your tendrils. 

i guess “weed” is a harsh moniker. 

there are no such things as weeds; simply plants that are wanted and plants that are not. however, it’s even harsher, i recognize, to admit that you are unwanted, no matter how true it may be. 

you are invasive—you choke, steal, and inhale any inch of space in your path until (by the grace of nature) your reign is strictly ended by some insurmountable force; but you are alive. 

maybe there’s a world where you are a beautifully manicured rose or a soft, sweet daisy. maybe in another world, the gardener will see you and smile down on your long green arms adorned in tiny white flowers, thankful for your overwhelming expansiveness. maybe, just maybe, there exists a world where you are the gardener, deciding which of us is to stay and which is to go.

to that i say, there is hope for us weeds. 

hope in the potential that one day, someone won’t grimace and grovel at our ugly but celebrate and smile, even, our beauty. 

hope that we may find a garden that will delight in giving us so much room to grow that we won’t even know where to begin. 

hope that one day we, too, will be loved like the flowers and the fruit trees we so detested in the many lifetimes before us.

until that day, mr. weed, may we travel on the wind, from garden to garden—house to house. the gardeners may spite our resilience, may shame our perseverance to live, may scrape at our feet until our roots are scourged from the dirt. but we will persist. for how can our flowers be worth treasuring if there are no weeds worth demolishing? 

i have found my garden mr. weed. it is time for you to find yours.

sentiments,

miss. flower