Lately I’ve been thinking a lot of heartbreak. I myself have experienced it in a variety of ways. Love in any form can break us, but it can also feed us and make us flourish like a beautiful garden. 

The show “Sex Education” is a wonderful study of all things love and sex, both platonic and romantic, and it is filled with a million amazing quotes, but my favorite is this:

“When you love someone, there’s always a tiny part of you that’s terrified that one day you’re going to lose them.” 

I think this is the complexity of love that makes is so bittersweet and lovely, but it can be hard to understand why we put ourselves through this. As a lover of poetry and art, I’ve read hundreds of writers describing love through nature, and so as the poets do, I think the best way to understand love and life is to think of a garden. 

I think as we grow up and come into consciousness, as we come of age, there are spaces, or holes rather.

In our freshly tilled flower bed, these are the holes in which we plant our seeds. 

As we witness the world around us, the questions of who we are and who we want to be arise, and each flower represents an answer to those questions. Some holes are small, what’s my favorite color or should I be a swimmer or a diver? These are easy. 

Some are bigger. What are my passions, how do I love those in my life, who am I when nothing surrounds me? These holes are scarier, but they’re far away and broad, and as we bring people into our lives, they fertilize us and help us fill these big and small holes. 

It’s not inherently bad or good, in fact it’s lovely in a way. It’s what makes life an ecosystem. All these intertwined relationships, the barista that makes my coffee every morning, the mailman who brings me the shirt I bought online that was made by someone oceans away, these interactions make us witness to the bigger story that we are a part of. 

This is how our garden blooms. Some flowers we plant ourselves. We start small, with daisies and marigolds. Friends, family, strangers, lovers all help us, some more than others. 

Some people, like a visiting butterfly, fly through our life, leaving us with the memory of their pretty wings gently flapping in our eyes. Others come and cleanse our soil, rid our garden of weeds and pests. These are the people who move mountains in your life, who fertilize your garden in a way no one else can. These are the people you truly love and who truly love you.

 And it seems, the bigger, more fearful holes that seemed daunting to us in youth, the questions we couldn’t answer ourselves, have smoothed over and budded beautiful bushes of roses. Vise versa, we do the same for others. I plant a tulip in my lover’s garden and he plants a lily in mine, and together we thrive in the beautiful blending of petals until our garden feels like an Eden for just the two of us. 

But on a random day, I wake up, and the person who once watered my garden daily is gone. It feels as if a tornado has come and rip through my Eden, and the sun has grown three sizes and blinded me and dried up my flowers.

The once small holes waiting for seeds to sprout have crumbled into the big holes and my garden is one huge crater in drought, parched and in need of sustenance that I can’t give it.

I resist this change. I stomp my feet and thrash my arms in hurt and anger because I didn’t see this coming, I didn’t prepare, I wasn’t ready. The lines blurred, colors merged, and I wasn’t ready to tend my garden on my own, nor did I want to. It feels like the ground is crumbling beneath my feet and there is no way to heal it, to nurture my soil back to proper health. 

But such is the case of nature. Destruction is inevitable and sometimes necessary. Soil is burned and tilled until it is reborn, ready for the new. It’s a painful process, the fires scorch and blades bury deep, new holes form themselves and you’re suddenly at square one, your garden ready to start anew. 

It’s not so bad. Each day brings new things, new dreams, new terrors. Such is life. You will remember how to plant flowers once more and you will be blessed with the patience and grace it takes to do so. 

But the beauty is not in what flowers bloom in our garden, but in the ecosystem that births itself. The butterflies that float through, the bees that come to sting and soften. And you remember that you are just one part of the beautiful and wild changing of seasons, and it is this romance that eventually allows you to cope.