For a long time I told myself I couldn’t grow plants, but this year I decided to believe something different. I have to admit, when you sprouted that Thursday in May I was a little freaked out. There was something about having a living presence emerge between substrate and plastic wrap that felt out of my control, like I had activated an unfamiliar new energy and had no choice now but to tend, and to witness.
Like every love letter, this one is a little bit about violence. The shit that could’ve happened, the shit that did. The tangle of hurts and choices that brought us to each other. The times I mistakenly thought our love would save me from violence, and the ways you kept me alive anyway. All the hours I spent staring lovingly at you, smelling your soil, leaning my face against your leaves in the sun. I could feel that time doing something to my body, shaping my desires and my gaze into something loamy and green and growing.
I’ve looked at you as yet another ambulance siren went off outside my window, bathing you in red light in the early days of avoidable death and government-sanctioned genocide called a pandemic in the United States. I’ve come home to water you after protesting past curfew, after walking past the white cops on my block saying “You wanna go to jail?”, after taking the steps two at a time and opening the door and laying on the couch and remembering you were there. My sweet sweet silly loves. Now wilty, now tall, now leaning perilously in a summer storm. The sense-memory of you held in my earthen palms.
In a long season of loss and change, your unabashed need grounded me back into my skin. As I cycled through different shapes of breaking up, coming apart, in search of relief, a place to rest, a good night’s sleep, you were there and you needed water, a bigger container, a brighter patch of sun. You reminded me that to need things and to tell others about those needs are not passive gestures, but ways of actively shaping your own survival. Being thirsty doesn’t need to be pretty, it can just be dry and fucking upsetting. And I learned to listen.
The kind of love you grew in me felt generous, full and bursting to share. Carrying you in a paper bag up to the apartment of the older couple with a community garden plot who I had met through a friend. Filming morning updates about you that I sent to my friends, my parents, my sister. Carrying you cradled in a red Solo cup, down the stairs of my building to my crush’s car. Handing you off to friends who shared your growth through Whatsapp videos. Visiting you in my partner’s garden plot. Marveling at the ways you adapted and shaped yourself to different soils, my loves tending my loves in all the places we called home.
Note: The tomato plants I grew this year were Moyamensing Tomatoes, from Truelove Seeds. Truelove is a Philly-based seed company that sources their products from small-scale farmers. Their entire collection (especially the African Diaspora Collection) and their podcast have been a huge source of inspiration and plant education for me.