It was never the leaving.

The leaving always feels like your still-beating heart is being ripped from your chest, along with your lungs and the rest of your vital organs, regardless of how many times you've been through it, so it was never the leaving that was beneficial.

It's the starting over. Not many people can claim the ability to reinvent themselves five times over with no one the wiser. Reinvent is perhaps not even the word. Reinvent implies a conscious change from the norm simply for the sake of change, and perhaps a little shock value. What I'm talking about is a relaxation of societal walls, a repotting of the soul if you will, done explicitly so the individual inside may not feel so cramped from within the clay exterior she has built around herself in the time since her last uprooting.

The container was plenty big enough when she arrived on the sill; enough for growing room and everything. But grow she did, and grow she continues to do, even as her spindly white roots curl around the edges of the now far-too-close space. However, once potted, it's so difficult to rid oneself of the "comfortable" exterior. It's nearly impossible to change with others looking on.

But when the little plant falls off the sill and onto the ground below the constricting pot may break, allowing those persistently growing roots to relax and take hold in the fertile ground of the flower bed. It hurts, oh it hurts, but the loss of a few leaves, even a broken stem, ultimately go toward a new, bigger, healthier plant altogether.

Every once in awhile the little growing tree is trodden upon by someone who did not realize the plant left the sill at all, or if she did, she had perished or stayed the same since last seen. Perhaps soon she will become offensive to those who prefer the cute little fern to a big ugly tree in their flower bed, and the feel of the axe will hurt, too. Felling is more than uncomfortable, it is the death of a soul.

But for now she grows and hopes to God she is not stuffed into another pot in another house again; she hopes she will be left to her own growing and mending and branching and if they all grow together no one is alone.

ink :: graphite