Dear Forest,

I’m glad you’ve found a love that feels warmer than the olive oil that dripped between your eyebrows on the night lesbian fanfiction was discovered on the family MacBook. I’m grateful you’ve found a purpose that feels holier than the cracker my fumbling fingers broke yesterday during my first voluntary church service since. My heart pines for what your heart propagates.

I’ve moved 6 times in 4 years in search of a place that feels like home never did. In contrast, you find home in spade and soil; in kettle and ladle; in pen and paper. The question marks in my life became exclamations in yours.

Though I feel you cheer with every lesson learned, I often wonder if you fight the urge to toss tomatoes. Are you resentful of a 27-year-old who scrolls away 6 hours of your remaining youth at a time, reducing her value to a waist-to-hip ratio? Are you pained to watch me repeatedly empty my cup into the deserts of others while my own garden dies of thirst? Do you roll your eyes in contempt at the time it took for me to submit to my first writing contest?

Or perhaps you’re more forgiving than I am of the 15-year-old seed that lived boldly without affirmation; the 17-year-old sprout who was the only black girl in her college computer science classes; the 24-year-old vine who quit her job to frolic about the Yucatan Peninsula; the 26-year-old bud who’s best friends with the Malabar spinach she grows on her big-city balcony.

I’ve always felt like everyone around me received a manual on how to be human, and my copy was lost in the mail. Future self, my life’s work is to ensure that if you ever get the memo in your mailbox, you’ll verdantly return the misaddressed package to sender.

Signed,

-Bloom