Returning to my broken home, the tomatoes are choked and rotten. My eyes skim past the moistened brown leaves, drowning my dying plants as November comes to an end.
I seem to remember finding peace for a time; peace in the prospect of healing and change. My rewards would continue to multiply, my loves to blossom. I would withdraw to my den in sorrow and in peace, let my wounds heal, and return to comfortable labour and after that, the return of my beloved. I could relax, and let the problems stew, and I would rest on them, and calm them with my hopeful strength.
Only, the beasts that had awoken in me continued to stir. I thought acknowledging their existence was the beginning of the end of the long-fought battle. But I was wrong. They had yet to reveal their full power to me.
The little garden I had planted, my little square plot of hope for new life, was not enough to sustain me. The demons that stewed in that old, broken house-hold began to eat at my very flesh. The wounds I suffered daily became too much to bare. I relied more and more heavily on the one person who gave me life, who was constantly weeks and months away from me, and it felt like a life-time (and yet from where I am now, I would give my life to return to those days when I knew he'd return).
I followed my fleeing mother. And just like everything in that house, including me, my garden was abandoned. We are still hiding in our cave together, as the walls of that old house continue to fall into decay, and those who keep it allow the squalor to seek deeper into their bones.
I come back to it out of necessity, and find my tomato vines crowded and collapsed, their fruit, unripe and rotting on the ground beneath them. But behind them, accompanied by a city of weeds, there is something growing that I had forgotten. His mother's everbearing raspberry bushes. His everbearing raspberry bushes. Taken from his garden and planted in mine. Carved out of a decade of his life, bearing fruit that gave way to continuous memories.
Even in the midst of the decaying home I have fled from, seeing these raspberries of his is the only thing of his that I can look upon that does not cause me pain. They are my only hope, my only beacon of light amidst the squalor and sorrow.
I tried to heal. I tried to fill my life with enough to sustain me, so that he would not have to bear me as a burden. But I failed. I failed him and I failed myself. Now he is gone, and there is nothing in me but death.
If I have wounded him, I would give anything to heal the damage I've caused. I will never stop loving him.
But it is scary to know that if you were to see someone and not be able to be with them, it would drive you to an insanity greater than imagination, and your only escape would be death.
