Citruses Always Grow Here
Putting a plant in soil is choosing to believe in the promise ahead.
A few weeks ago, my dear friend Mia visited from New York.
Upon landing here, she took off her coat and let her skin be caressed by the Los Angeles sun. I looked on smiling with my coat, thinking this is how the plants and trees must feel.
The next day, she pointed out how many citrus trees in homes were ready for harvest in winter. I had never noticed. I’ve been here my whole life. The eternal affection of the sun, the orange specks in the trees, and the promise we had to our plants was blurred by bitterness to me. A bitterness rooted in walking an endless path only to reach another bifurcation. A bitterness in hoarding words and names in my mouth that only collected more syllables. A bitterness of a past preferred but increasingly opaque and far from me. Opacity that invited me to fill the colors lost with shades of delusion and faulty memory mismatched from the hues in my photographs. An opacity that made the citrus trees nebulous. Like a passenger on an apathetic train watching the world zoom past him, leaving only streaks and smudges in his mind.
Mia returned home a few days later.
Today, the sun made love to the city. I left my coat hanging at home. I walked to the train station lending myself to the city that took me in years ago.
It is like realizing that grief is our moniker that we were capable of love. It is like hugging a friend after prolonged separation. Like a reminder that you can be loved.
I look out at the train window.
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I’ve already lost count of the citrus trees.