These seeds,

dropped long ago from the shaker-pods of the giant that overlooks the dry West African savannah. Those towering, spreading branches that birth lacy leaves, flame flowers, and long shaker pods browning, opening, discarding seeds onto the earth…

Seeds heavy with memory.

These seeds,

fallen onto the red arid soil where my desperate fingers found them long ago. I remember caressing each seed, sliding them against my fingertips. I enclosed them tightly in my palm, begging time to stand still, and then I abandoned them to the clink of a small glass bottle

and carried them with me over oceans.

These seeds

lay in quiet slumber within that precious bottle—that tiny glass vial—brought along with me in pockets, suitcases, boxes filled with clothes and books and other forgotten things.

Today I found them. Those precious seeds in that worn glass bottle. I emptied them into my hand, pleading for them to have been preserved somehow,

to have kept my memories buried, immobile, safe…

…to have stayed just as I imagined they were,

suspended not in my hand but back somewhere across oceans, under a Flame Tree, encasing my childhood, my heart, my grief so delicately within the smoothness of their hard, striped shell…How much have I kept buried in one small seed,

a desperate piece of home carried over oceans in a fragile bottle.

These seeds…

I once had dreams of planting them somewhere; someplace I might stay, might submerge my own roots…

Somewhere I might call home. Where I would finally take those seeds from their bottle and plant them deep in the soil, where they could release all of those memories and all of that anger and grief and confusion and plunge it all deep, deeper…

I am so weary of carrying them. I am exhausted of gazing at them through weathered glass, so desperately tired of holding them too tightly in my hands

as if I could have ever possibly captured and encased my whole life and all of my dreams and all my memories within their tiny womb…

These seeds…

I once had dreams of planting them. But they will probably never grow.

I have carried them too long over oceans in a bottle.