Black Ink and Parchment

You only wrote to me once, like planting a message in a place you had no intention of ever returning to. The silence should have been a quiet closing of a garden gate. But my hands clear dead leaves to search for another message, thinking it might be hesitant to bloom as if you were just too proud or too afraid to say you missed me.

At least that is what I let myself believe while strolling through our poison garden.

But somewhere deep down in the dirt where the truth settles so deeply it forgets its own name, I know you’ve traveled into another garden, where love doesn’t come with sharp thorns and established roots. You deserve something easy. A happiness that doesn’t come with buds or bruised petals.

 But there’s a twisted, ugly part of me that wishes otherwise. I wish you deserved the chaos I create. Something you would have to tend, or it might disappear forever. I wish, selfishly, quietly, you had been something wild enough to survive the garden I tried to plant for us. That you deserved me.

But you don’t.

 And maybe the cruelest truth of all is this: I don’t deserve you either.