i’m touching grass. like you said. i’m kneeling in the field, tears running down my face as i scrounge in the soil. i’m tearing up handfuls and then i’m pressing my nose to the dirt, welting my cheeks with the snaking patterns of overlapping blades. it’s working, i can tell. just a few more handfuls
it’s staining my sneakers; i feel i can’t get close enough to the stems — i’m clawing around in the lowest inches of the meadow like the final throes of a maimed beast. i see why you do this. you do it like this right? tears come like rain now; i’m replenishing the meadow as i tear it from its home
rapturous. the tremors come from deep and catch in my throat, quivering up from organs that nervously eye each other as outside i crawl along the grass. my frayed neurons smooth over as i send verdant signals by every pathway there is, a quaking newsstand laden with joyous headlines of the war being over.
oh god, this must be it. this must be that holy errand you were sending me on — you knew it would affect me in this way, the healing ecstasy of it, the reluctant and then heaving transmigration. the sensation blooms in me like moss retaking the rusted cities after the end of man, patient, insistent
when you cast me out to the meadows i rolled my eyes and all their luggage. when i first knelt, how could i have known what elation, what obliterating euphoria awaited beneath my palms? i see echoes of that self; a mere shade of who i must be now.
i touch grass, and it is the birth of the rest of my life.