...some sort of weed-pulling savant

i woke with dreams of roots and you. not Roots, the dramatic mini-series, but root roots, the bifurcating and mysterious expansion of a pale to translucent assembly of plant feet. root roots, the kind that finger through soil and grip, with all their life, to a specific spot, and, in fact, become so connected to their particular plot that upheaval often means certain death. i dreamt of roots in the sense that one looks at a picture of a famous event, say the fall of the twin towers, and recalls that image over and over in the modern art museum of your sleep. these roots were bright white, almost fluorescent, and completely isolated, hanging in picture frames as normal and one would photograph a single flower and call it entire. but the roots belonged to something, someone, and yet the owner had been cut off and the soil removed, roots laid threadbare and washed like a heart someone left behind.

then there was you, interspersed with my visions of roots, like fall leaves caught in the boughs of young and inexperienced maple trees. you felt so very far away and i questioned whether not or we had actually met before. my fingers get tongue tied trying to explain just how i felt watching you move away from me. we floated through my melancholy mind, surreal as sea nymphs, equally detached from one another as the roots from their homes. somehow i felt i lost you as sure as i lost any sort of grounding, as sure as i'm floating, as sure as i'm not sure. and i'll be honest, your distance was the most disturbing part of all.

clearly my mind is telling me something. perhaps i'm very uncomfortable floating around in my life, perhaps i need to set an anchor, find a mooring point, lay down some roots. or perhaps i'm saying i should persue a career in gardening, perhaps i'm some sort of weed-pulling savant.