GARDENERS OF TIME

We are gardeners of time,
reapers of expectations.

Every morning,
the world returns to the soil
the weeds we pulled out yesterday.

There are roots that do not die.

They only wait.

They grow in the darkness,
fed by fear,
by memory,
by the wounds we buried without laying them to rest,
by the lies that continue to breathe,
by the disappointments we learned to carry
as if they were part of the body.

There are pains that do not disappear.

They descend.

They find a place inside us
and build their roots there.

A word.

An abandonment.

A betrayal.

A broken promise.

A love that ended
without ever finding an ending.

And we keep cultivating.

Man tends his own garden
while believing he is merely surviving.

He prunes what wounds him,
buries what has begun to rot,
waters what still waits
and protects small flowers
against the violence of the seasons.

Then he looks upon the scars
and calls maturity
what time has left behind.

But time does not cultivate.

Time consumes.

It passes over petals
with the indifference of someone walking over corpses.

No season remains.

No flower makes an agreement with the night.

No root is deep enough
to escape the blade of days.

And still, we plant.

We plant after betrayal.

After abandonment.

After the lie.

After discovering
that some people loved
only what they could take from us.

We plant upon the ruins
of the things we swore would last forever.

And we call hope
what is often nothing more
than the inability to accept loss.

Beneath every flower
there is something buried.

A promise that rotted away.

A name we no longer speak.

A dream that died before it was born.

A version of ourselves
that remained behind
the moment we understood
that some doors do not close.

They expel us.

Every hope carries
a hidden blade.

Every desire opens in the chest
a place for loss.

The more we love,
the deeper we dig.

The more we hope,
the higher we build
the place from which we will fall.

And we continue.

We pull out the weeds
as if trying to tear from ourselves
our own nature.

But they return.

They always return.

Some roots belong
to what we are.

The resentment we nurture.

The guilt we conceal.

The anger we pretend to have forgotten.

The need to be recognized
by those who never truly saw us.

Everything we refuse to face
finds fertile soil in memory.

And grows.

Then we reap.

We reap the lies
we tell ourselves.

The expectations
we turn into chains.

The promises
we continue waiting for
from those who have already left.

The wounds
we have fed for years
as if suffering could
resurrect the past.

Some roots need to die.

Some memories need to lose
the nourishment of our presence.

Some people need to remain
where time left them.

Not every absence is emptiness.

Not every ending is loss.

Not every scar asks to be healed.

Some wounds never close.

They become part of the architecture
of who we have survived.

The garden grows over our ruins.

And what we call the future
is only the past
being born with another face.

We repeat gestures.

We repeat desires.

We repeat mistakes.

We repeat loves.

We change the faces.

We change the names.

We change the seasons.

The roots remain.

That is the cruelty:

we spend our lives trying to escape
what wounded us

and, without realizing it,
we build our identity
around the wound.

The garden matures
when we learn to distinguish
the flower from what merely
feeds upon it.

Then we cut.

Without hatred.

Without nostalgia.

Without asking the past for permission.

We cut until we bleed.

Some pruning
must reach the root.

Time moves on.

It does not comfort.

It does not forgive.

It does not return.

It simply passes.

And gathers the harvest.

Flowers, failures,
loves, ambitions,
lies, losses,
desires and ruins.

Everything ends between its hands.

In the end,

we do not own the garden.

We are the soil.

Time plants within us
without asking permission
and harvests without seeking consent.

We bloom knowing
that every flower
carries its own ruin.

And when the night ends,

we return to the earth.

With wounded hands,
a memory filled with the dead
and a new seed between our fingers.

We plant again.

Even knowing.

Even after everything.

And then we understand, too late:

we did not spend our lives cultivating a garden.

We spent our lives choosing
what we would have to lose.

---

J. Kasra
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