Thriving
by Sarina Bosco

The seasons bleed into each other.

Humans have a habit of separating things, of clearly defining them. We rarely accept reality – that sometimes it snows in April. That the harvest won’t be ready in time for the fair.

I decided to fall in love again in the winter of 2013. I planted that seed long before I planted any others, although I began mapping out the garden and watching the cigar tree at twilight. It takes a long time for things to grow, and a long time for the ground to thaw. That year was a dry winter. In every moment spent awake I was aware of only bittersweet in the trees, of the mint bruised blue with frost, of the contents of the compost spilling out grotesquely from its confines.

In spring I discussed the irrigation of south-western states with a friend and spent my days worrying about seedlings instead of love. I coaxed them up from potting soil, raised them before the French doors and slowly introduced the earth that they would eventually thrive in.

When the ground was loose enough to dig into, I began crafting furrows with my hands. I began to remember how it felt when the grit separated your nails from the flesh and buried itself in the crevices of your knees and toes.

Somehow when I was talking to him at night the leaves on the cigar tree unfurled. Everything, everything bloomed. The back right hand side of the garden was scented with oregano and lilac. I had to focus to follow the twisted branches of the latter and trim them into better growth.

At night I walked barefoot out to the cucumber patch and broke them open. I liked the wet snap of them under the yellow moon and how they tasted cooler than the shade. I liked them on my tongue.

He arrived in late fall, and I forgot the harvest. Only the tomatoes made it inside to be fried and served for breakfast. Something got to the cabbage and ate at it, the broccoli flowered, the peas were too fat and bitter. But I had never been more ripe.

I began to understand what it was to grow beneath someone else’s hands. We waited for the dark. He named the stars and I let the flowers of the cigar tree tumble pale across my thighs. Things grow at night, too. You can hear the shoots if you listen close enough and the roots stretching in the dirt. They are the same sounds that the body makes.

Seasons bleed into each other. Bleed out. We’re not sure when the lilacs stopped flowering and the mint goes slowly. People leave, but linger in the rooms that they have been in. We talk about whether we should plant strawberries this year, and whether or not the old apple tree will bear fruit now that we’ve released it from the choking ivy.

But really we are trying to find a way to talk about the rustling sound inside of us. We are trying to explain that we want our bodies heavy, deliciously split open on nights that carry the musk of tomatoes and wild flowers. We want what we can’t define.
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Sarina Bosco is a chronic New Englander. When she isn’t writing, she is trying to find the perfect tomato soup recipe and learning how to install various household fixtures.

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Stories @ Digging Through the Fat: Volume 2, Issue 19
July 1, 2015
Photography by: Gessy Alvarez