Disaster sprouted like weeds in your garden of hydrangeas and petal-soft whispers. Not a second could flutter by without you finding another reason to crumble. Another stupid fucking dandelion, which, yes, do count as weeds. This time it was a typo in your selfie caption. Last time it was an 85% on your midterm. And next time, next time who fucking knows? Next time is infinite. You felt omniscient under your hyper-focused lens, always zoomed in on the next unwanted sprout. You’d like to take your kitchen shears, stab it into the acidic earth, ruin the roots.
It was easier to delete the post. You did. But you’re angry, anyway. You’d like a microdose of control, one day, when your salary was annual and April meant taxes. You want the resolution of an arena bull locked on a flapping red blanket. Or, better yet, someone to triple dog dare you to do what you’ve always wanted and call it compliance. It’s a sympathetic excuse, being too submissive. For once, you’d like to be complicit in your own satisfaction, a bystander to your aspirations.
There’s an entity lurking in your closet, from the Renaissance era of being motivated to study, dressed in origami triangles of carbon-hexagon notes. Her name is World Literature Final Essay, due 6/29 at 11:59PM. You’re haunted enough to not sleep, not eat, not text back when people respond to your latest live-tweets about your crippling depression, but never enough to even open up a Google Doc dedicated to the essay. You’ve peeled off the white paint on the window sill to reveal some kind of metal underneath the flaky, white acetone-smelling scabs. And that’s it, that’s your only accomplishment so far, and you can safely call it an accomplishment because you did look up the definition and it just means completion and it’s something you completed so yes, that’s an accomplishment.
When your phone started buzzing (why can’t she take a hint), you immediately went for the red circle. But then she called again, and again after you declined the call, and then it became the worst game of whack-a-mole you’ve ever played. This was stupid. You finally let the green circle have its limelight. You don’t chime in with a greeting to let her know that you’ve picked up and not actually just grazed the accept call button with your butt.
It was that blissful moment of vacant phone static that felt like a spritz of sugar water on a freshly cut bouquet.
“Um. Hello?”
You blew a raspberry, and hung up. You didn’t ask for her concern, not for anything she can offer. You don’t know what you want from her and that’s the ticket to winning the lottery of dissatisfaction. You’ll never know anything. You’ve heard that some professors could have their life’s work dedicated to anything as microscopic as the electron-transport chain and still never twist all the colors to the right sides of the cube. You were succumbed to your own un-knowledge.
Even the hydrangeas are weeds in your ugly garden.