Walking Home

I have spent years tending to other people’s gardens.

Waking before dawn,
hands deep in soil that never knew my name,
watering rows of root and vine,
mistaking exhaustion for devotion.

I learned the weather of other people’s moods.
Learned how to bloom on command.
How to silence the small wild voice inside me
asking,
What about your own wilderness?

Then one morning,
the orchard ripened.

Blackberries darkened like spilled ink.
Apples glowed red among the leaves.

On my toes, I reach for a ripe apple,

A voice cuts through the air.

Do not touch those apples,
They do not belong to you.
You have grown them for us.
They are ours!

Just like that,
I am turned out onto an untamed road.
I am carrying nothing
Only the ruins of who I have been.

Somewhere in the stillness,
a truth arrives.

You have spent your life tending borrowed fields.
Your own soul has been waiting beneath the weeds.

So I walk.

I sleep beneath open skies.
And follow wildflowers blooming at the roadside,
their petals turn like tiny compass needles.

Step by step,
they lead me home.

At the edge of a luminous lake
stands a small forgotten cabin,
wrapped in cedar and climbing ivy.

The garden has gone wild in my absence.

Dandelions lean in the wind.
Bees drift through lavender.
Birdsongs spill from the trees.

And suddenly,
I know this place.

Some of these seeds
have been waiting for me for years,
quiet beneath the soil.

I lay down in the clover,
the earth warm beneath my back,
and feel myself return.

Not to who I used to be.

To who I was
before I abandoned myself
for the comfort of being needed.

Above me,
the sky stretches vast.

No one can take this from me now.

In time,
I will tend this garden gently.
Not to earn love.
Not to prove my worth.

And when the apples ripen again,
I will rise onto my toes and pick one,
melting into the sweetness
without guilt.