Ten steps back to where the vision began.

There’s a wolf that keeps visiting me at night. One that finds space between a breath and a thought and wedges itself through. I try to ignore it and continue to abandon the soft spot in my garden I’ve been digging into — even when it hovers over my shoulder and tries to find my evasive gaze just so I’d rediscover the courage to continue what I’ve started.

Sometimes it shifts. Transforms. 

Some days, it morphs into a vaguely familiar face I thought I’ve long forgotten, taps my shoulder with that same persistent air that clogs up my lungs until I’m heaving out all the things I’ve left to rot somewhere in the pit of my stomach. Some days, it looks like my father sitting in the driver’s seat, sometimes in the bones of my house with no windows and doors, with the same words that still echo somewhere in the depths of my memory.

No matter its form, I find myself frozen. Stuck in the same muck that makes seconds feel unbearable, a flood that has already subsided but left ruins and a muddied aftermath I’m too terrified to sift through.

Is the garden just my body…? Is the wolf just a shadow—my shadow—I keep mistaking for a predator out to smother me?

I wonder when I’ll learn to find the courage to finally look at it in the eyes to find the answer.

sometimes I catch myself frozen in fear simmering in sylvia plath’s fig tree analogy, but then I end up thinking about the pink cosmos that grow in my garden and how every few seasons they naturally rot and die – nothing left but withered skeletons of what they used to be, that easily crumble and shatter into fragments when touched – only for their dried out seeds to fall and sprout a new collection of vibrant blooms and flowers a few weeks later.

last season’s fruits may rot before you can pick them, but another season will always bring in a new batch to harvest. as long as the tree is alive, as long as you keep watering that tree.

you are allowed to be too many things at once. you can embody something new every other season if that’s what you wish. no door is permanently closed. you can always walk back to versions of yourself—peek inside, sit with possibilities and just be. you are allowed to try everything. to dip your toes in every path that piques your curiosity, and dive into ones where you feel your soul light up. fray and ignite. potential is limitless, so much so that reality shifts when you decide to be more than just one, fixed singular being. let yourself fall apart and be reborn, time and time again. refuse to lock the door on yourself.

because for some of us, it is only through rotting that we can bloom.