My blessed garden isn’t abundant, yet its sweetness and incandescence radiate a beauty unachievable through quantifiable means. My garden may be small, but it is as beautiful as I could hope. It is as magical as I wish. It is as mine as it could be. 

Greens, and pinks, and yellows, and whites all speckle the grassy garden floor, leaving few blades visible to the eye. Though it may be crowded, it’s cozier than it is cramped. It’s Lilliputian in size, but grandeur lies in between the lines; the size of my garden is incalculable to anyone who attempts to analyze comparable appearance. 

As esoteric as it is sacrosanct, my garden resides deep within the grove—only stumbled upon by the flowers who also call my garden home. Each blooming blossom symbolizes a love that is rooted in my heart and leaks vines like capillaries. Hydrangeas, peonies, and baby’s breath—each flower a person, each person a secret key to the garden.

On the days when being whole is horrid, the garden beckons and calls me home. Through gilded, golden gates I go, my tarsus grazing the floral floor beneath my footing. My steps stay gentle and giant through the boroughs of bouquets. I tread lightly, for my flowers’ trust is as organic as the smell. My flowers keep me safe and happy, and I them: a symbiotic, sugary sweetness we share. 

My garden may encapsulate and enthrall for days, but horror is no foreign feeling inside the gilded, golden gates. Infestation upon infiltration upon invasion have wreaked havoc among even the most sacred of my homes, the garden included. Each incursion a rose, sometimes two. Planting themselves, they assure me. This time, they say, will be different. This time, they say, we are the garden.

But that is exactly what a weed says. 

No one is the garden. The garden is a collective we, an inviolable idea including all—all but the weeds. When the weeds weasel their way in and wet their lips with reminders that they are the garden, they wilt their own wishes. The roses are anything but a twinkle in my eye. The roses are nothing but a fleeting, freelance escapade. Deserving of no space, I fill their spaces before they’ve even left. 

I loathe roses for the rosy reason that a rose itself is not a garden, but a rogue. 

With my garden free of roses, I sit. With my garden porcelain and pristine, I ponder when the next rose will come. With my garden still in my belongings, I prepare for the day when I must battle to keep it mine. 

For my garden, I fight, and my garden fights for me—come ruin, come rain, or come roses.