Tag: codependency

We never did make it…

We never did make it to the Halloween party. Even though I was dressed as Eowyn, and you were dressed as Aragon, and we carried collectors’ swords and you carried a dagger that an elderly Asian lady on the train thought was a Samurai sword. The way we chuckled at her look of disappointment when she realised it was simply a Lord of the Rings dagger.

We never did make it to the Halloween party, and my little voice who sees the truth told me we’d never make it. It said we’d travel the train lines in humid, sweat coated circles, five hours on a Sunday, around and around. Me with my little brain voice and the louder brain voice that sings off-key in a child’s voice, singing for hope.

That is the way of it, the way of us.

There is always alcohol and drugs, and there’s always hope.

Hope that if I keep trying, that I can engage you with the world. Hope that if I only try a bit harder, you won’t need a beer, a Carlton dry long neck sipped from a paper bag at a Western Sydney train station, the Valium, a flutter at the pokies.

We never did make it to the Halloween party.

Just letting you know; I’ve been watering your garden.

Just so you know, I’ve been watering your plants all winter. You remember, those plants that you plucked feverishly from Bunnings clearance trays, the seedlings we pilfered from torn plastic planters piled outside for Council pickup,

            remember

before you crept inside your mind and made a nest with your demons.

I’ve been watering your ferns, your monsteras, your Tahitian bridal ivy, your ornamental orange tree that flowers but never bears fruit, and I’ve been watering as an act of ritual,

and what else is such a ritual but

an act of love and

 perhaps an act of resistance?

through that confusing damp, wet, winter where the black mould crept along our concrete walls and the tomato plants flooded despite their adequate drainage,

I watered,

crooked stalks that looked like dandelions but weren’t and plants that were possibly invasive species

or simply just weeds.

Even while you swaddled yourself with weed and booze and spent your days scrolling through doom-scapes [and yes, they would call this enabling]

[the AA, the co-dependency experts]

I’ve been watering your plants

 as ritual,

                                                                        as rebellion,

but I thought you should know about those plants we rescued, the ones wrapped in black plastic with flat angular leaves, the ones we rescued on a hopeful night-

Those plants are blooming.

I think they’re irises.

If I stare at them long enough, they look like silken lilac and gold origami cranes,

gazing up at the lightening sky.