I’m digging a hole in a quiet corner of the yard, between the oak and the pine. The soil here is heavy with clay and the shovel keeps hitting tree roots.

I crouch down to clear some pinecones and dry leaves with my hands. How big do you make a grave? I frown at the pot of hyacinths I’ve brought. Will they make it? Is there enough sunlight here? I’ve chosen bulbs that will come back each spring, but the chill of the breeze has me doubting myself. Somehow it seems fitting that I should plant something that dies in the night, to wake tomorrow to find the stems bent and bowed, the petals strewn on the ground.

I’m self-conscious, with my back turned to the neighbours’ houses, and I work quickly, furtively whispering a prayer that no one looks out their windows to see me kneeling in the dirt, talking to myself.

—-

In recent months, I’ve been plagued by dreams that I’m leaving for a trip but am hopelessly unprepared. A cabbie waits for me curbside, but my luggage is ridiculously crammed with things I don’t need, like plastic shopping bags full of wet snacks that ooze onto the floor, a puddle pooling around the little suitcase wheels. I’m half-dressed. I check my ticket to realize I’m too late, the flight departed an hour ago. And the cabbie stands on the porch, smoking. “Ready, miss?” I clutch at my housecoat; my eyes are wild.

I wake in a panic, lost and disoriented. And as I try to ease back into sleep, I’m slowly flooded with regret and shame, and memories I can’t leave behind.

Just where the hell am I going, anyway?

—-

A part of me feels silly and precious, like I’m going through the motions of a therapist-mandated ceremony. But I’ll admit that this was all my idea. I have written a eulogy that I’ve folded into a tiny square. I have given it a pretty box. And now I place it in the ground, thinking of what I’m burying, and what I will keep.

I think of my wild self, the drama and recklessness, and the strange ways that I was brave.

When I was small, but my hunger was huge.

Climbing into cars with men I shouldn’t have trusted, laughing, heartsick, brewing another disaster, and knowing that this one might be worse than the last.

Walking home at one in the morning, the sole pedestrian on the overpass, thinking, I shouldn’t be here.

The feeling of danger that followed me back to my apartment, where I’d bolt the locks and check the closets, and lie in bed convinced that something terrible was about to happen.

So many morning-afters. Dizzy with fatigue, faced pressed to bus windows, half-formed excuses to managers roiling in my brain.

The welcome distractions—friends and booze and dinners out that I could not afford.

I was ravenous, but I hadn’t yet learned to feed myself.

—-

Ready?

I place the hyacinths in the hole. They’re white and fragile, like a first snow.

I thought I would feel different. I thought I might weep. But there is only finality, a sense of seeing this through.

A red-winged blackbird shrieks. He is my only witness.

—–

A month later, I look out to see that the flowers are still there. They shouldn’t have survived the freak storm of late April, yet there they are, and so I am, too.