A seed is where it all begins. An arm brushing past yours at a summer party. A look exchanged and then hurriedly denied across a room. The sillage of cologne that belonged to the man who was just here before you. How do you find him now? Put out a missed connection ad? Leave it to destiny? Forget. The seed of a stare, of flirtation, the seed of challenge dropped just so; the seed of mystery, of intrigue, of a stranger so well known to you. These are the seeds that we scatter and collect each day of our lives.

I used to believe it was the way she smiled. The way the darkness went to hide inside her hair. Or the bold arch of her eyebrow that dared me to not love her. I thought it was the way the night woke up in her eyes, or how a murmuration of swallows seemed to escape her lips each time she threw her head back and laughed at me. And when her shirt came unbuttoned beneath her nimble fingers and fell like a sheath on the floor, I looked down to see the seeds scattered everywhere. Pick them up. Make them yours. Pick them up. Make them mine. Be mine. I am yours. I have made you mine.

Put a seed in your breast pocket and the heat of your heart will force it into living.

Put a seed in your mouth and think of the woman you love. When you meet her, watch petals fall from your lips each time you take her name.

Put a seed in your palm and close it when you sleep.
In the morning, you will need to climb out of a net of ivy that grew to keep the under-bed monsters from getting to you.

Pick up the seeds the clouds throw down in an act of fate. Some are made for rain, some just destined to be dew. Every moment alive is a chance to grow, and ameliorate the less fortunate. Each time they look at you waiting to catch your eye, linger. Let yourself be caught. When your knuckles dust against each others’, stop, and plant the chance to hold a hand. And if you happen to fall in love with an impossible thing, throw down the seeds of impracticality, unpredictability, and character-building. There is one for everything.

Let me tell you this: where she stood was a field of everything that could be, and all that had no possibility of survival. When she stood before me and lightning blew a hole through my chest, I reached out to grab the bolt and seared my palm. I never wanted to forget gentleness so brutal that it made my knees tremble to look. When I see my naked body, I see her everywhere. Shoots and stalks of kisses, of breath and tongue imprints. I see fallows of every future that I did not dare to tempt fate with. My pores are the places where she rains on me still; my hands the barren land where I once held the vase-like dune of her waist. And my tongue. Where a thousand yards of words still sprout and fall limp from going unsaid.