Wild Spring essay by Geoffrey Mak ; ermagazine.com
Although I know what it is to grieve in advance, and this isn’t it. I cry because your love is like watching time reversing itself. Imagine my surprise at getting the chance to relive a youth I thought had been aborted by suffering. Before I met you, I knew entire landscapes of loneliness. I desired, but knew my own desire only as something that, if expressed, would meet scorn, rejection, revulsion, or pity, and so I learned to keep it secret within a walled garden of sand and dandelions. Like someone born in the desert and knowing only the desert, I forced myself to be grateful for the dunes. I gave thanks for the high wind and the sandstorms and the conical red hills and the haycocks.
And then one day, not knowing where I was going, I stepped outside my walled garden and saw, for the first time, a wild Spring. I discovered the rose, which bursts open its gaudy face unafraid of the predatory squirrels and aphids that threaten to ridicule its trust in the sun. I discovered the foxglove whose blossoms dangle like fifty tiny horns, declaring, at all hours, the presence of majesty. I saw colours I didn’t know existed—ochre, fuschia, saffron, marigold.Moss and lilac and Prussian blue. I marvelled at the peonies because I didn’t know it was possible to fit so many petals into a shape only as large as a human heart.
I didn’t yet know the difference between annuals and perennials. So when the peonies died, I mourned their loss. When they returned the following Spring, I was so surprised I wept, because I didn’t know that’s how perennials work, how love works.
