the garden don’t lie and neither do my ribs when i bend to pull weeds—three cracked truths wrapped in lavender-scented gauze, and the cat just watches like she knows i’m trying to stay soft in a world that made me blade. i remember the dirt under my nails felt like baptism, like finally owning the wreckage instead of hiding it in drunk texts or blackouts or stories i couldn’t finish because the bottle ended them first.

ain’t no manual for this but if there was it’d start: step one: stop pretending your pain ain’t sacred. step two: give it sunlight. scream your sorrow in rhythm, let it hit like a snare drum in a war march, double-time grief till it’s got a groove, a cadence so sick even your shadow wants to dance again. i ain’t holy but i been held by something bigger when my knees hit the mud, whispering not prayers but promises: you still here? then grow.

and i spit verses in the soil, sing eulogies to versions of me that never made it out the bar, never made it off the highway, that folded under fists or folded themselves into silence. they said don’t feel too much, so i built an empire outta feeling. named every thorn joy, every relapse scripture, every broken rib a beat i ain’t done rapping over yet.

i caught a mouse in the cat’s room—she looked at me like, “we don’t kill here,” and i nodded like we had both been prey before. we just watch birds now, let them be. same way i watch my own pain sprout flowers i didn’t plant on purpose. the garden is wild and half-ruined and goddamn glorious, and somehow, so am i.

this is not metaphor. this is muscle memory. this is how i remember her—in the way basil climbs the fence like it’s trying to reach someone who left without saying goodbye. in the way i drank her away but she still shows up in the smell of chamomile and gasoline. in the way i keep writing with every style i ever bled, every rhythm i ever rode, every fire i never put out.

and if you ask me what this is, i’ll say it’s everything at once. it’s the rebel hymn, the procedural resurrection, the whispered patois, the soft-spoken ache, the sensual eruption, the poetic wound.
i’ll say: it’s me.
and it’s true.
because the garden don’t lie.
and neither do i.