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Pretty pink petunia’s line the houses of the street I grew up on, and I wonder as I pass them by if any of them truly know where they are at. If they know that they are thriving in a container, something that will hold them there until the day they die, stems and leaves and buds like extended arms reaching out and falling below from where they hang as if they are reaching for freedom. Reaching for the ground where they might escape.
It’s then I wonder, as those pretty pink petunias in my vision turn into the highway passing me by as I ride in the backseat of my brother’s SUV (now my mother’s, seeing as how he won’t have much use for it, being dead and all), that if they were to reach their freedom, would they even realize that they still have not quite reached it? Like a fish that has lived all its life in a tank, suddenly finding its way into a pond, would the petunias know that the earth they’ve found is just a bigger pot in comparison to the universe itself? Would the fish even know?
If I was shot off into space, and I somehow made it past the edge of our universe, would there only ever be a bigger pond waiting for me on the other side?
I don’t know the answer. Maybe I won’t ever, but I still ponder all these questions in my head, as I come to terms with the feelings that are steadily growing inside my heart as we pass by rows and rows of corn. Pass by the hours in silence, as I look at my mother’s head, her graying hair looking almost like straw in the dying sunlight. Her hands grip the steering wheel so tight it’s turning her knuckles white; in the rearview, I can see her eyebrows, furrowed so deeply that it looks like someone drew on the wrinkles of her forehead. Her eyes are fixated on the road ahead of her. She chews endlessly on her gums.
I look down at my hands, wiggling my fingers, studying my skin. Every line, every fold- how the muscle and skin bunches when my fingers bend, and I wonder if my mother knows that it wasn’t all her fault. That it’s just the nature of everything in the wild; human beings are so caught up in their own intelligence, that they forget where it is they came from as they reach for the stars in the sky. What it is they live in.
We are so comfortable with our routines, and yet so desperate to get away from them, all at once. We are the wild we live in; we are the petunias, reaching endlessly for the ground in the hopes of something more. Shaking our seeds out in the wind and the rain, out into the unknown and all of the danger, in the hopes they will know what true freedom is like.
I’ve been told over and over that I look like her. My mother. I glance between the marks on her skin and my own, and I ache knowing that they are right. To look in the mirror is to look into half of a reflection of her. I am a fractal made up of half of her hopes and dreams and wishes.
I wonder if my brother just couldn’t handle knowing the same. I wonder if he ached like this, knowing the same.