The heartbreak is everywhere, it's under my fingernails and stuck in my pores. I scrub and scrub to no avail, a slow bath of hopeful words. A spring of fear bubbles up somewhere on our small garden plot, and they uprooted you as a seedling, they mistook you for a weed. So many small splatters of green, like paint stains, resilient where they had chosen to nurture the fragile, the fruiting, the weak. The young chubby faces in the faded photograph, hand-me-down clothes, in lunch line from recess, seen through the bars of the school gate. There's a current of anxiety, it's in the groundwater feeding our roots and leaves all these years, until we're made out of that fear. They couldn't tell what you were without that bloom of character, but would it even have mattered to them if they had seen more than that small splatter of green? Just a paint stain on their canvas so clean and so plain. A spring of trust bubbles up somewhere they never thought to plot. And god how our roots have been so thirsty. And we backache who we are by the fence over by the briar and their garden bed dried up, clay, clay everywhere. Young thin faces in digital photographs hand-mended clothes cross legged and serious, seen through the blooms of our irises. There's a current of genuine honesty, it's in the groundwater feeding our roots and leaves, just a few years. I want to grow out of my fear.