The greenhouse
"For I would rather stand amid the ruins of something real than the quiet safety of a heart that never dared to shine."
On repeat in my head, the same way you are in my heart.
I have always imagined my heart
as a weathered greenhouse at the world’s furthest edge.
Its glass panels fogged with breath,
its beams humming with the quiet audacity
of trying to shelter something
the earth itself could not keep.
Inside, something far stranger, far grander.
A glowing tree that should not exist,
its branches stitched with a light
that looks older than memory
and newer than the morning.
A tree that blooms asterisms instead of petals,
each one pulsing with some fragment
of what I have survived,
what I have given,
what I have dreamed.
My stubbornness.
My softness.
My capacity to rise after breaking.
And yes,
the deepest, brightest bloom on its tallest branch
my love for you.
This greenhouse was not built to be safe.
Its glass shakes when laughter hits it too hard,
and its roof sweats in summer
as if bearing the weight of its own devotion.
But I tend it proudly,
even knowing storms approach
with the kind of wind
that remembers how to shatter things.
I leave the door open anyway.
Love deserves air,
even when the air is sharp.
To love you is to let that radiant tree
grow taller than the roof,
pressing its branches upward
until they crack a few panes
simply because they refuse to stop reaching.
It hurts to repair them,
but I would rather mend broken glass
than prune back the one thing
that makes the whole place glow.
Sometimes when the panes give way,
a brittle gasp, a glittering collapse,
as if the sheer pressure of loving you
is too vast for anything made by human hands to contain,
I let the shards fall around my ankles,
bright as crushed stars.
If this love must crush the greenhouse to prove it lived,
let it crush,
for I would rather stand amid the ruins of something real
than the quiet safety
of a heart that never dared to shine.
In other words,
when my last breath loosens itself from my chest,
the love I carried for you will lift with it,
off my warm body and into the wide universe,
no longer housed in my living form,
but drifting onward as the faint, bright trace
of a life the world will one day forget,
yet was once overflowing with fierce devotion.
Even knowing this,
I choose you.
I choose the trembling glass,
the roots lifting the floorboards,
the branches pressing against the roof
as if they want to greet the sky.
I choose the strange, impossible tree
that grew because you existed.
And if loving you
is what makes the greenhouse shake
and glow and almost break,
then let it shake.
Let it glow.
Let it be remembered by the wind
long after both of us are gone.