Things I Buried So They Could Grow

I did not bury them to forget.

I buried them

because the weight was too much

for my hands to hold in daylight.

Some griefs are seeds

whether we mean them to be or not.

You press them into the dark

and hope the soil understands

what you cannot say out loud.

I buried the name I never spoke again,

the letter I couldn’t send,

the apology that turned to salt

each time it reached my tongue.

I buried a winter,

an entire season of silence

that kept trying to bloom in my chest

like frost pretending to be flowers.

For a long time, nothing happened.

The earth stayed closed,

and I convinced myself

that was mercy.

But the ground has its own memory.

Grief rots,

and in rotting,

feeds whatever comes next.

One morning,

I found shoots rising

where I had knelt months before —

thin, trembling, stubborn things,

green as a new beginning

and shaped exactly like the loss

I thought I had buried forever.

That’s when I understood:

not everything planted

was meant to stay hidden.

Some things return

not to haunt you

but to hand you back

the parts of yourself

you buried with them.

And so now,

when something breaks

and I don’t know where to put it,

I take it to the softest soil I can find.

I bury it gently,

cover it with patience,

and wait —

not for forgetting,

but for whatever living thing

it decides to become.