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.