The Devil's Guts

Aka Field Bindweed and such

Do you ever feel like you’re flubbing it?

“It” doesn’t even have to be one specific thing — just the general all-around-you feeling that you’re not getting it, doing it, or being it.

This feeling has been sitting on my chest today and creeping up into my throat. I think I’ve disappointed someone, but I don’t know who. I’ve failed it, somehow, but not sure in what way.

I’ve tried different methods of escape:

• Watching A Woman of Substance

• Eating a blackened shrimp taco

• Throwing out all the old food in the fridge

• Driving to the pharmacy

• Pulling a bunch of bindweed while it rained, briefly

It feels like bindweed, this feeling. That it can find you wherever you are, sprout three new vines from severed roots. Creep into every crevice. Knot itself around anything it pleases.

I’ve been trying to teach my muscles to let go, but they don’t want to. A lifetime of fear, I guess, and they’re holding so tight to my bones. I am captive.

So I sat today in the backyard, watching these sprouts. I planted thousands of seeds at the wrong time of year, in the wrong kind of soil, and watched the mourning dove root around and take the tastiest ones home to his perch for lunch.

And yet, they’re growing. This little minuscule forest of green. Their green heads are curling upwards. Their leaves spring apart. They are alive, even though I did everything wrong.

And I suppose that means there’s a metaphor somewhere in that chip bark and peat. I’m not here to pretend that I know it or can write it. Just that I feel, sitting next to those seeds, some truth only a quarter inch high, that gets brighter in the sun.