I take up the spade, slicing the lush grass, upturning clods of dirt sewn by root threads, the distinct sound of surrender slashes the stalled humid night, rocks I unearth are meticulously pyred, their puzzle-fit a testament to my persistence and patience, four feet down I forgo the use of the spade, continuing my work on my hands and knees, on my belly when I begin to tire, my nails broken and bloody, my hands unrelenting in their toil, gouging the earth slowing to a scraping, my fingers cramped, my bruised body caked in sweat-made mud, finally halting, wracked with heavy breathing, I’m night blind and lost to the phosphenes, the rattle that stutters my lungs, gives a momentary cardiac arrest that resets my respirations and gives me the surge of revival, slowly rolling on my back, my hand instinctively splaying my stomach, and I watch as the stars float free of their atmospheric restraints, flashing a bioluminescent romance language of L'été that enchants me with distant memories of innocence, I foetal myself to preserve the moment and find myself longing for the comfort of a bedsheet, the thin layer of protection from spying satellite eyes, they’ll record me vulnerable and leak the secret, I toe the edge of anxiety, until the moony haze of honeysuckle pales my fears, and I’m lost to the memory of dusty quarry shelves cobwebbed in honeysuckle vines, I can bury myself one hundred times over and I’d still be me, I can’t rewrite the history, nor his going away, I can bed down under moss and become a maze of nourishment for arachnids and night crawlers, but I’m not the dead, so I pull myself up and climb out my grave, scooping the dirt back in, I feel a tug of reluctance, the fear of relinquishing a half to me, sitting and sifting the dirt atop my plot of earth, I decide it’s time to seed my grief and allow time to take its course, and the strangest of things happened, from that sorrow and my toil, sprouted a new species of happiness, to which I tended…

E.A. O'Connell