Her backyard was earth, but all she saw was the sea. The grass was worn, clipped closely to the heat-dried earth. It nuzzled up high to her house, swallowing the entire bottom floor before rolling down hill and bursting into untamed foliage. The bottom of her yard crashed like a wave, and the brambles that surged upward were the salty foam.
 
There was a spot beyond the fence that was as mysterious and dark as night waters. Beneath the sprawl of kudzu and stocky wild bushes there was a quiet place. The ground here was moist, dense with moss and clover. If ever there a scent to God’s breath, she would have been convinced that this was it. When she was a child, she felt safe sprawled on the velvet floor, protected by the green umbrella of so many wide leaves. She was so happy there and to speak aloud seemed that it would break the tranquil joy that radiated all around. It was those times that she discovered silent appreciation for life – what moved her rocked her soul, but did not break the still landscape of her face. Through her mother and father she learned what to care for and appreciate, but it was the reflective strength of nature that taught her how to love. Sometimes when she stumbled home from the little nook, she felt so sun-drunk and full that if she tipped, all that she had absorbed would gush free.
 
She started to grow up. At first, it was nothing but flesh and bones that reshaped. Though she spoke and thought as a fawn, her body had begun to flesh out into a wild doe. And on wobbly legs, walked out into the world. The rushing torrents of a water slide may have blooded her first, when the fine hair on her legs was still tender and blonde, but the sacrifice did not protect her. Hateful, quivering hands found her and she was never the same again. From there, so many fingers came for her – and each one of them left a stain on her skin, and she saw them all as drowning worms squirming up from the flooded earth to breathe. She no longer felt warm, and her smiles were only a show of teeth and nothing more.
 
She grew and grew. What youth she had she tucked away, folded that little skinny girl up and hid her behind her own ribs. She could not stand to see that child winded, to see her laughter end in misery. As an adult, she found love, but she had spent so long in two pieces – that she had no idea how to free her young soul from behind such dense bone. She tried to be whole, she tried to be perfect. Both of those endeavors turned out to be failures. She was saddled with the realization that no matter the strength of her efforts, she would always fall short and live in a twilight of half-life. The woman decided to return to that backyard, now long overgrown and abandoned.
 
Today, she has found it again, realizing that her now adult form does not tuck so neatly into this hollow anymore. The weight of her breasts, hips and her fertile womb seem only garish and grotesque. Inside her, there is movement, and suddenly a torrent of emotion breaks the frame of her ribs and spills out steaming. She has birthed her youth into the world again, and laid her narrow, blemished body out onto the small mossy home. Fingerprints were as numerous as her freckles, and the ridges of their owners prints rose like welts on her summer-pink skin. Her breath was sweet and almost indistinguishable from the forest air around them both. 
 
There, the doe wept over the fawn. If she could not protect her, then she would leave the child in the only safe place she ever knew. 
 
And from there, begin to drift.

You’re trying to latch a stubborn earring into your lobe, pinching the impossibly small metal backing in one hand and using numb fingers from a too long elevated arm to pierce a thin spear of metal into the hole dimpling your flesh. Sometimes, this act requires enough experience that a slightly inebriated surgeon might give you a shot at repairing a weak aortal wall. 

Course, seven times out of ten you’re going to drop one piece or another – and for me, it always seem to bounce its way across carpet or wooden flooring to disappear right under my bed. Then there’s getting down on your hands and knees, hearing the familiar pop and grind beneath your left knee cap. It’s worth it. The earrings are cute.

You reach under, grope, and slide your fingers over the floor waiting for the metal to jump up and nip into your palm. It would appear to all be going to plan, and you anticipate once again wrestling with the blasted adornment. This time, though, your finger bumps into unfamiliar leather. You curl your fingers over the crushed heel of a boot and draw it back out into the light. 

You know the owner, you think. It isn’t anyone who has any business with their damn shoes under your bed, but there they are anyways – having lurked with the dust bunnies and the perpetually lost other half of your favorite pair of socks. You cup your hands around the ankle of the boot and without knowing it, you’re measuring. You won’t fit, your narrow feet and nimble toes would flounder in the cavern inside. 

But you’re comparing yourself anyways. You can’t help it. You trace the scuffs, study the fray of the laces and observe the worn rubber soles. You could’ve never done all that, and the history floods into you like a powerpoint dedicated to cold calculations based on comparative yardsticks. There’s nothing like you on this boot, not a single touchtone for you to connect with. 

Anxiety follows, and you have suddenly created a shadow leg that has spilled upward from the black mouth of leather that would have cradled the curve of a muscular calf. Then in panic, you find the boot’s match, and before you know it you’ve created a golem of your own fears. You start to see it in your mirror, and no matter how much you rend your flesh before it – it’s never good enough. It haunts your steps, crawls across your vision when you see loved ones and robs you of your confidence. You blacken your eyes, bind your hair, thrust yourself wantonly towards anyone, anything, that can see through that shadow and still reach you.

But the truth of the matter is, you created a monster that has stolen your bravery, your esteem, your beauty and your hope. Even if you had not dropped that earring and went looking, soon enough, those boots would have walked out on their own.

It is unavoidable.

It was a sour taste that lead her outside that day. It sat on her tongue reminiscent of a spongy brick and refused to be spit out even with the most furious of words. The greatest dismay in that early morning sun was that the air smelt like lilac and jasmine but the taste still remained.

What was she doing there?

She was holding together fine wires and trying to bind them with smoke. Her heritage sprawled behind her like Cambodian minefields laid into a magnificent garden. Though she wanted so dearly to maintain the hedges and flowers, the ground threatened her very life. There was no fairy tale gift of flight, in which she could glide amongst the rows and pluck the weeds and brambles without harm. It was only something she could view with a mixture of horror and adoration. 

Would she be the first to lay a path around it safely or one of the many of her blood who never made the trek across? She did not want to carve another endless and dangerous path within. Surely, there must be a way through, without abandoning the effort and turning away from the very thing that made her herself. If there was so a way, would she manage it a martyr or a causality? And in the most happiest of endings, could she end up on the other side with her soles intact and her past disarmed? 

Could she, just possibly, emerge from that garden with plants not nourished by tears and begin another plot anew? It’s hard to say or predict, because sometimes she wonders herself if it is the mines among the flora that make her history so profound and stirring.

However, today, that sourness on her tongue gives her no hope for reflection or foraging on. It’s just a day,yet another one in which she learns to live with both the roses and their thorns.