Image Credit: David Clode, Unsplash
Written by Ruby Saggers, Associate Creative Writing Editor
I grew up in the countryside. There had always been a difference in the way particular flowers grew; some straight, some slanted, some trodden into the mud. You could see the morning dew scattered across the grass so carefully you would think the droplets chose these blades to be their forever home. But there was always the possibility for one blade to be left untouched. That blade, dear Mother Nature, is I.
Me, myself, and I rolled amongst the daisies, ignorant to the suggestion that ‘human friends’ would be better for me. Instead, I befriended the snails feasting on leaves, webbed palms of frogs placed carefully atop a mossy bedding. I sat in the classroom, knees knocking under the oak table, observing the people around me. People I could have been friends with, but did not wish to be friends with me.
Why am I not like you?
She had been closest to nature yet felt the furthest from it.
She could glide through the adventures of the Bagginses but would not dare face another human.
And when I tried my hardest to change, I distanced myself further from those I tried to become. Becoming them did not help me befriend them. It seemed as though the world and all its inhabitants were one united body, and I had been sucked away from it – deep into orbit.
To be placed firmly on earth once again meant being completely and utterly myself. To run through the green carefree, to write and read and talk about it all at once.
Though that one blade had been untouched it still sat amongst the dewy field. There had been no need to change, because its time would come. And when the water touched the dissimilar, the difference was newly recognised as beauty. Growing up throws upon you all kinds of change; the bodily, the psychological, the spiritual. What it could not change was the frogs and the snails and the mossy bedding, the adventures with Smaug and Thorin and Balin. There is a beauty to difference, in a world made up of tight threads to follow. Those not like this earth would find me… with time.