sarah harley

The Things We Neglect

When love beckons you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep…
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden…
Even as he is for your growth
So is he for your pruning.

Khalil Gibran

It was the height of summer. In a detached and catatonic state, I made a summer panzanella salad. I chopped fresh tomatoes and herbs from the garden. I toasted slices of sea salt bread and then cut them into perfect small cubes. We ate the salad in the garden like defunct Italian lovers outside a villa. The air was thin; I could not breathe.

The following night, you used your fist to suddenly smash the ripe, bright green peppers and the red tomatoes. I remember the organic primordial sound. I had picked them from the garden the day before and put them in a wooden bowl on the white kitchen table. Then, you took a knife from the drawer and repeatedly stabbed the kitchen table. This happened because you watched me try to hide the knife from you.

“Are you fucking afraid of me?”

You asked the question in a voice both slurred and sharpened with alcohol. There was a raging and screaming around the house I can hardly recall: pulling and tearing of blankets, clothes from hangers torn down in a blur.

Storming outside, you picked up glasses, coffee cups, and a burning candle from the table and shattered them on the ground. Then you picked up the patio table and threw it across the garden. Next followed the four chairs, thrown high and landing into the wooden trellises inside the garden boxes. Still not done, you repeatedly kicked the metal fire pit and the fire burning inside, over and over, as if you were flogging a dead horse. Then, as hard as you could, you hurled the firepit in the same direction as the table and chairs. Small fires start to burn throughout the garden like settlements.

I crouched in the shadows, my heart racing out of my chest. I called 911.

The next day, I tried to restore the garden, which was mostly destroyed. I swept up the broken glass, which was everywhere. It was over, finally over. I sat in the garden and cried.

🪻 

A year later, the garden had grown into an acceptance of its own neglect. Herbs, the parsley and the thyme, and other edible plants, the Swiss chard and the wild lettuces, had flowered and then bolted, growing high flowering stalks with small black seeds. In the act of going to seed, the plants squandered the resources of water and sunlight that would have nourished their leaves and roots. The basil, in my absence, had run riot, leaving crumpled, dried leaves around the base of its stems and exposed roots. The dill had developed into a tall, unrecognizable version of itself, as if it were growing within a meadow. At the back of the garden, the mint had overgrown, tangling itself into a rising undergrowth of nettles, strangling the stems of the nearby bolting phlox. Nearby, the bergamot toppled in the wind, its leaves dusky and powdery, faded pink crumpled flowers fluttering in the wind. After seeding, the annual plants started to die. Tiny fragments and splinters of broken glass glinted and glittered in the undergrowth.

🪻 

At the start of the pandemic, the garden was my pride and joy. Along with every person who had access to even the tiniest outdoor space, I spent hours in the small garden, carefully tending to the herbs, grasses, and flowers, deadheading spent blooms at the earliest sign of decline. I felt so grateful for the perennials, for they came to life in the first spring of the pandemic when everything else was shutting down.

That spring, when the perennials showed their first signs of life––small green leaves appearing on woody stems and branches, tiny shoots pushing through the surface of the dark earth––I tended to them with love. I tucked fresh soil around their roots and gently surrounded their base with dark clumps of soft, wood mulch. I placed the mulch in small careful handfuls. Gone were the days when I’d quickly pour a bag of mulch onto the flower border, in the confines of an hour or less on a Saturday afternoon, before getting ready to go out and meet friends. Now I had all the time in the world. In this way, the garden became a sanctuary, a place that guarded my solitude.

🪻 

My own reality during the pandemic was a tricky isolation. Schools closed on Friday, March 13th, two days after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. I remember standing at the whiteboard in my high school classroom, writing the word pandemic and then breaking apart the word into its morphemes. It was one of my last acts as a teacher in the Before Times. My students stared at me wide eyed as I explained the Spanish Flu, how many people had perished, and the statistical probability of COVID’s lethality. There were 6 cases in the city.

Working from home, living alone, only talking to friends, family, and co-workers on the phone or remotely was hard. I tried to combat the isolation with activity: going on long walks, organizing my kitchen like a professional chef, taking online singing lessons at the conservatory of music. I bought a ukulele. Most of all, I spent hours in the garden, observing the absence of human sound replaced by the aria of birdsong. I touched the moss: velvety, bright green, and fragile. In a war-like stillness, I built trellises from branches I collected by the river; I constructed tepees using bamboo sticks for the tiny bean seedlings to grow up. I even ordered plants from a nursery with the hopes of restoring a native plant prairie to the small space. I traveled back in time, to a gentler place, somewhere far away from the present.

I also set up a profile on a dating app, mostly because it appeared on one of my to-do lists. I was anxious to shade in the square box next to the item because doing so gave me a feeling of moving forward in the standstill. Although I could not see it at the time, the isolation had impacted my judgment. I met a man, fell in love too quickly, dismantled all the walls and turrets that had kept me safe after the last round of heartbreak. In no time, I embarked on the painful journey of self-abandonment and subsequent self-neglect.

🪻  

The first time he came to my house, I watched him walk down the road, tall and handsome, carrying his black guitar, a bunch of sunflowers, and a cord of firewood. In the kitchen, we made dinner together, singing songs and laughing as if we had been doing so for a lifetime. He wrapped his arms around me. We built a fire in the garden. We kissed for the first time. We fit together like two peas in a pod. It truly felt like true love.

In the wild and giddy spring of the new relationship, the lilacs in my garden bloomed, forming their buds on the plant’s old wood. As with most rhythms in nature we imagine are fixed, the lilacs actually have their own predetermined timeline, releasing their heady fragrance into the spring rain, opening their small clusters of petals when the time suits them. The small buds hold themselves tightly closed before blooming for a fleeting time only. Long before they flower, the lilacs contain the memories of all the years gone by.

Every so often, the lilacs bloom early, out of time, against the season. When this happens, they have to withstand weak sunlight, the possibility of frost, and an accumulation of snow. I planted the tiny shrub a few years ago, next to the old wooden deck in the back garden. Back then, I pictured the lilac growing up to become a small tree, imagining myself one day sitting in its shade drinking coffee.

In the second spring of the pandemic, I sat under the lilac tree with the man. We had been dating on but mostly off for less than a year. We sat at the table on the back deck in the twilight having drinks. I thought he was a person he turned out not to be; I thought I had woken up in a fairytale, but that turned out to be untrue.

A part of me had already detached from the relationship due to its turbulence. She watched us sitting outside, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head, although even she could not help but appreciate the prettiness of the scene: the pale evening sky, the twinkling fairy lights wound around the branches of the lilac. On the table, there was a flickering candle. The man held my hand, told me he loved me. It seemed enough.

🪻 

Although they bloom for a fleeting time, lilacs are known to outlive their owners, often living for over a hundred years. When the relationship ended, I took long solitary drives through the countryside. I recognized large and overgrown lilac trees at the edge of the road. The farmhouse and its owner were now both long gone, but the lilacs remained as a testimony of a place once called home, where someone took the time to plant a flower. The lilacs, standing alone by the roadside, offered a refuge for grief, a reminder of the passing of time.

A lilac tree once grew over the small gate to the garden of the childhood house. When it bloomed, you could walk under the blossoms and imagine you were going into a fairytale, which in fact you were not. In the spring, my mother would tend to the lilacs in ways she did not tend to her children. As soon as the flowers bloomed, she pruned the branches to ensure the tree’s continued growth. The task was conducted with severity; I remember the sight of the fresh blooms lying in a heap at the bottom of the stone steps. I felt frightened to watch her cut the flowers like that. Then she cut small sprigs, with the heart shaped leaves intact, and placed them in a jam jar filled with water. I can still picture the jar of flowers in the middle of the wooden table in the kitchen. The scene distills the feeling of home, the idea of belonging, the promise that everything would be all right. But it goes no further than that. By the time my father gets home, my mother has gone green-eyed and vacant from the blue pills and alcohol. The jar of flowers will be thrown across the room. The glass will shatter; the petals will wilt and die on the kitchen floor.

🪻 

During the relationship, I would always wake up in bed alone. When I went outside to the garden, I’d find the man there, early in the morning, smoking cigarettes and getting high, drinking coffee. I tried to push aside the emotions that the sight produced. Was it fear, shame, worry? I tried to suppress my feelings, but they lingered and took root deep within me, as if they were holding their breath.

The man was volatile, like an unstable chemical. Naturally, I was drawn to him as this quality felt like home. The relationship set off a familiar chemical reaction inside me in response to an iteration, started in childhood, of how to love an addict, a person always seeking a fix to fill the emptiness inside. As such, the man used me as a fix; my body became the line of crack on a dirty table, even though I was always longing for something prettier, something magical. 

In the middle of the affair, I abandoned myself.  I always worried about him, putting his needs before my own, neglecting to look after myself. I can see myself, in constant states of self-doubt and confusion, pacing up and down the wooden floors of my house. 

In time, I became like a vacant farmhouse next to the road. The leaves and branches of an overgrown lilac tree covered my windows. I was dark inside. Wild nettles grew tall amidst the lilac’s lower branches. The door of the farmhouse swung open with a gust of wind, bringing rain.

I see it now. I walked out on myself when I should have walked out on him. The self-betrayal was an ultimate act of self-neglect because I went against my own needs to avoid conflict with him. Betraying myself was an act of self-sabotage. The tendency began in childhood, trying to make my mother love me, care for me. I can see myself as a child walking down an old, abandoned piece of railway track with a small pack on my back. I always took the long way home. The tendency is rooted in love. But it’s the love you keep holding for the person who hurts you; it’s the love that’s meant for someone else, the love that’s meant for you.

🪻 

That summer, I started to acquire the trappings of being a girlfriend: the silk robe, the satin nightdress, the perfume that smelled smoky and earthy like a forest. I dressed myself for the man as you would dress a doll. One time I wore a simple grey piece of string around my neck, over my clothes, which made him choke up. He said that only I could make a piece of string special. Perhaps I reminded him of a lost version of himself. After all, he was trying to find his way back to himself through me.

One time, he gave me an olive-colored sweater and a pair of silver lotus earrings. When I put them on and stood in front of the mirror, I stared at my reflection. I am a girlfriend. Someone loves me. The rationale became an excuse for me to entirely take leave of my senses. 

I see now that I was trying to enact a restoration, a recovery of loss. I wanted to embody the abstraction of being a girlfriend, the long lost girl, rather than occupy the other half of a relationship. I wanted to wear the amulet of being loved instead of simply learning to love myself.

🪻 

The lilac had bloomed, clusters of withered brown petals gathered over the patio. It was midsummer. I had picked the blood red tomatoes and bright green peppers from the garden. I put them in a bowl on the table in the kitchen. The man was coming over to eat, so I went to great lengths, in a mildly numb state, to prepare a panzanella salad. On the phone, he told me that he told all the people where he worked that his girl was making him a panzanella salad. This made me feel anxious. His voice was racing, almost incoherent. I chopped the herbs and sliced tomatoes with a sharp knife, toasted bread. When he arrived, he handed me a fifty dollar bill.

“Keep this safe from me. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to use it to buy drugs.”

He wrapped his arms around me; I put the money in a drawer. My heart thudded in the hollow cavity of my chest.

At the table outside, he ate the meal hurriedly, gruffly; his elbows were on the table. I watched him eat with a silent hatred that I knew belonged to my mother and not to me. But some things don’t die. They live inside you as thoughts you have to keep recognizing and letting go of, or they run riot and sabotage any chance you may have at love. You have to keep the cage door of your mind open to keep letting the thoughts out.

🪻 

The next morning, he enfolded me in one of his holding embraces. He stroked the top of my head and smoothed my hair as if I were a child or an animal. I wanted to break away from him. He had been drinking already. I could smell the new alcohol mixing with the old from the night before.

“I just want to hold you for six seconds. I’m going to start counting now.”

He spoke with slurred confidence. I felt myself turning cold. And then he began to count.

“One quarter of a second. One third. One eighth” and so on with the mathematical genius he possessed. I wanted to break away but couldn't. I chose to continue, chose to stay.

He was still counting and I allowed myself to lean in, to surrender. He was counting slowly, tenderly. I believed him. There was a backdrop of everything falling apart, like a city on fire in a war, but I refused to see it. I denied reality fiercely.

He kept counting and kept holding me. I knew I had to break away, but I felt as if I had been drugged.

“Two. Two and one sixteenth.”

It was magical and terrifying at the same time. He was counting and enfolding me. It’s a space I falsely imagined as safety. It seemed like a safe space because I was already broken. Broken hard. Looking back, I know he recognized that parts of me were as broken as him. He walked into the overgrown ruins and made himself a home there.

As the numbers grew larger, I became smaller. Making broken tidy.

The six seconds went by slower than usual, faster than imagined. In that instant, as in all the times I had watched us from the outside, we were captured in a cinematic frame, frozen and petrified, like a moss-covered statue of lovers entwined in a Victorian garden. I struggled to see myself separate from him, not just a part of him or a reflection of him. I could no longer discern. I saw us, but I finally saw a choice. I longed for him but, for the first time, I also truly longed to break away.

And there we were, suspended in time like motes of dust. Two lovers, standing together, as if in an embrace. It’s part forgiveness and part promise, half love and half fear. It is most definitely broken. But like the ice that breaks over a frozen lake, I could hear the aching, beautiful song.

🪻 

We had arranged to meet later that day. I put on an olive green silk blouse tied at the neck with a braided cord that ended in a soft puffy tassel. It was embroidered with flowers. I wore denim shorts and white tennis shoes. When I met him, he looked me up and down as if we were strangers. After hours of hard drinking that he had started in the morning, the man pulled on the tassel and opened the front of the blouse, reaching inside and grabbing my breast as if it belonged to him.

That night, we sat under the lilac tree, holding hands and betrothing our futures to each other for eternity. I really did love him, although it was wrong to do so and came at a high cost to myself and my own safety.

At some point, the disintegration started; the descent to the dark place commenced. He started to play songs with frightening lyrics on his phone. He knew all the words, singing each word with deliberate slurring incoherence. He kept playing “The King of Pain” and singing along with a voice out of key, draining the song of its beauty, leaving only the menace of a disembodied soul.

“This is my song,” he kept saying.

Then he sang the refrain to me, staring into my eyes,

“I guess I'm always hoping that you'll end this reign, But it's my destiny to be the king of pain.” 

When he sang the line, I realized that he knew I would have to leave, even though I loved him.

He demanded the money he had asked me to hide from him the night before.

“I’m going to smoke some crack.”

“Give. Me. My. Money!”

He screamed the words at me, his eyes black, dead inside. In an act of poor judgment, I declined to give him the money, trying to look out for his safety while gravely risking my own.

“You’re a whore. You’re a damn whore.”

He began to smash things: the blue tumblers on the table, coffee cups, a glass bowl. Then he began to throw things: the table, the chairs, the firepit. I felt frightened to watch someone like that. He beheaded all the Echinacea flowers that were in full bloom against the side of the house. I watched them fall unceremoniously to the ground. I returned to childhood. I went around the circle once more.

🪻

After the relationship ended, it was hard for me to go into the garden, the sanctuary that I had shared with the person who harmed me, who almost broke me in the end. Whenever I went out there, I saw a hunched ghostly apparition of him that remained in his absence. I felt so many conflicting emotions: disappointment, horror, engulfing sadness. Was horror even an emotion? I couldn’t go out there without thinking of him. He had taken the space from me just as he had taken other things like trust and a hope for a happy ending. So I stayed away and neglected the garden, as well as my life.

From the window, I saw the overgrowth happening. Something had disappeared in the garden. A part of me wished that the grasses, flowers, and plants would engulf the house, wrapping their vines and branches over the windows so I would never have to leave, face the outside. 

Escaping yourself is never the answer, especially when the escape is via another person. It doesn't work as much as we wish it would. It leaves you buried in the weedy undergrowth of sorrow and despair. But escaping your own pain is also never the answer.

🪻 

At some point, I returned to the garden. I put on my gardening clothes, an old brown sweater, and old jeans with holes in the knees, tied up my hair and tucked it under a cotton head scarf. I knelt on the grass and carefully began to pick out the pieces of glass from the flower borders. I squinted my eyes to find the fragments glinting in the sunshine. Some pieces were larger than others. I choked back tears as I did so. I quietly dismantled the damaged fences, reshaped the deformed fire pit, carefully spaced the bamboo canes and wound new twine around them. I gently pruned the lilac tree and swept the patio.

Every so often, we meet someone, out of time, against the season of our lives. When this happens, we have to withstand all the forces that go against it, within us and without us. We have to withstand the reality that we met the person too late, after life had already destroyed them. No matter what we want, timing is everything.

Like the lilac that blooms again each year on the same branches, I began to slowly see that I could renew and regenerate. As an echo follows a sound or a shadow follows a form, I could stop neglecting myself and slowly rebuild my life, returning to innocence and gentleness, returning to the sanctuary of myself. I could return to the garden, the space that would remember.

All relationships, even those with ourselves, are formed on dead wood, on the foundations of our past experiences, even if those experiences may have been traumatic and painful. When love calls, follow, though the path may be difficult and steep, even if the love feels that it will break you. Though love may almost destroy you, as the north wind lays waste the garden, it always leads you back to yourself. The love I had for the man upended my world like a violent storm that ravaged the garden. But in the end, it led me to a deeper and lasting understanding of myself and to a greater love within and without myself.