"All Things of Nature"

My body is filled with sunlight, boiling beneath my skin (because I’ve been trapped indoors for too long). Soon I must return to where I am from.

I am happiest in the dark early mornings, before the birds are awake, when I am blind in the woods and finally focused on what’s going on around me, inside me. There is no hum of machinery, slowly and constantly fraying my soul. There is no concrete, only snapping twigs if I venture off course carelessly.

When I am so lucky, I can lean against my family, and with their support watch the horizon as new color marks another day. The sunset brings pink, the flushed cheek of a friend whose face I can no longer touch; the orange of the pressed flower I sent my grandmother in the last letter. I wonder where it is now, that flower? Broken in the bottom of a storage box? Pressed into a bible? It shouldn’t matter. Soon all is the shade of blue, of white, and there are flowers growing beside me.

Here in my home, lessons are easier yet much more complex than the foreign language of classroom conversation. I am growing as an elm, my mistakes turning into mushrooms at my feet. I can be as a fiery red thorn bush, aggressive and angry, ripping at you if you come too close. Tomorrow I will be an apple tree. You can bury your favorite dog under me.

My home is my soul which belongs in nature. I am the woods and it is me. I breathe because it lets me, I breathe because it tells me that life should be so simple. And I breathe because of the wind, because when it blows I am inspired to finally exhale. I cry because even the clouds need release.

And I smile, because every morning there’s a sunrise, and my promise to return.