Uprooted

I. I don’t trust easily anymore in a world that always seemed subtly nefarious and now explicitly so—

(Because I am older, I am older and I must know by now)

Where everything was built to turn a profit, where even the joy of color can be weaponized,

A monochrome skyline dressed in ads,

Designed/Studied/Procured to catch your eye.

I know I have been shaped as such, poured into the same ceramic mold, given a name and a purpose and a business card,

That I share too many qualities with a Pantone sample;

That I too, am on display.

That I too, am on display, by my own volition.

I have befriended all the dusted tins left behind on wooden shelves,

Shades too ornery for a respectable house, too brash.

Too loud.

Is it possible to cage the color red?

Is that why I feel so sad when I glance upon a gentle peach swatch, famished and cracking in the sterile fluorescence

Of yet another warehouse?

I cannot enter a warehouse, steeped in the smell of cut wood and metal,

Without recalling the forests that birthed me, deep and boding and green.

It is a green that resists capture—you know what I'm talking about—a vibrancy that only exists in the living,

A tincture that coats your corneas,

A shade so dew-soaked and sleepy you can feel it dripping down the optical nerve,

Honey-thick but a teaspoon short of saccharine.

The kind of green executives put on shampoo bottles, because a focus group said it reminded them of tranquility,

And tranquility sells, even if it’s artificial, even if it’s a reproduction.

I am so starved of rest that I will pay for it, even if it is plastic instead of pine,

Detergent masked as the promise of camphor.

I came here, searching for opportunity,

(Are we not all seeking that? Truly? Even the bees, visiting raggedy flowers in dried-out window boxes -- did they dream of fields, of fertility spilling onto sidewalks like a film of dust flung from a construction site?)

And found a city full of color,

But only the kind that takes.

There was nothing grown to give.

II. I have resided in the city that takes for some time now;

My eyes have adjusted.

As a child I only ever found beauty, like a treasure,

And it was easy—it was everywhere.

I was lucky, to have been shrouded in such a lush cloak,

Luckier still to have the memory instilled so clearly,

Even as I felt my identity leaching onto the chipped grout of a subway wall,

So far removed I may as well have been buried.

It was easy to scoff at a shampoo bottle, even as I bought it in longing,

It was harder to stand in line at the check-out,

Watching countless green obelisks march dutifully into the arms of a paper bag,

Wondering if the man in front of me dreams of conifers as he washes the city sepia from his hair.

III. My eyes have adjusted.

(Because I am still too young for resignation and just old enough to peel away the resentment)

Perhaps I breathed too deeply and swallowed a seed, and the sprouting vines have colonized the grooves of my mind,

For now I stand up too quickly and see stars in palettes I distilled from rooftop gardens,

The stalks must have curled around my spine, too, for when I arch my back too sharply

I can taste the bitter wet soil all seeds carry.

I harvest legumes from the community vegetable boxes.

I mourned for the greens of home and my neighbors helped me plant them — not the same, but alive, and giving;

I can’t tell if they gave me this,

Or I found it, like a child.

I think they led me here, knowing;

As I dug into the dirt, as I gave so it could give in turn,

That I was grown from the ground, too.

That my home had begun here, my memory, folded in earth, steeped in all the colors that permeate my conscience so deeply.

And when the garden gives we eat,

But the soil produces not for harvest but for harmony, for the sheer persistent force of vitality—

So maybe I can stop telling myself I was raised for a display, a market stall,

That I am beautiful for no reason at all,

Except that the land bears beautiful things.

And now, when I yearn for the spaces in-between, relief from the chaos, a reprieve from city-sickness,

I recall what it is I am.

A palimpsest of every plant that has cradled me, every root I played upon,

All the dandelions I plucked from cracked sidewalks,

Preying upon their resiliency,

Casting all my wishes on what-ifs.

I breathed too deeply and swallowed a seed,

And opportunity became me,

To plant my feet where roots are refuted,

To ignore the humming streetlights and unfurl in the tender, hot sun,

In a place where pines don’t grow, but green exists, nonetheless.