Link to article: There Is No Secret Garden.
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[[include :scp-wiki:theme:lampeter-warm]] [[>]] [[module rate]] [[/>]] Cadasyia was no place for us to live. It was, no, //is// a parasite which leeches off of the big city, an endless row of one-family houses and parking lots. It was no place for a changeling like me, with visible horns and cloven feet, and patchy body hair that always seemed to make itself known when I tried to wear a dress. It was no place for you, with your cropped hair and letterman jackets, and the way you always chose pants over skirts. It seemed welcoming when I was small, but as the woman I have always been revealed herself from beneath my fur, the city revealed our welcome had always been conditional. The streets grew eyes. In the places where I had once walked, sat, and laughed unnoticed, I was now painfully visible. The weary looks and guarded comments made the message loud and clear, and I began to leave my father's house less and less. Things weren't really much better there; My father always fell short, even though he was trying his best to understand. Although I loved him dearly, I knew he still thought of me as his baby boy, and that house began to feel more like a trap than a home. Your story was a little different, but you still felt just as suffocated by that place as I did. We left that place when I was 20, and you 21. Our entire lives were packed into two suitcases, and then loaded onto the first train leaving for other worlds in the morning. We told ourselves we were old enough to strike out on our own. In reality, neither of us believed that. We just wanted to make it somewhere better, somewhere were the two of us could belong. We were chasing a dream, specifically, one I had told you of many nights when you'd camped out at my father's house after a fight with your parents. In that dream, I'd wake up in a greenhouse full of flowers, an ornate glass building attached to a small house, that led to a cobblestone road. Or sometimes, it would just be a little apartment in a big city, with a room for me to grow my plants. Whatever the case, friends, and beautiful community gardens, and fresh food was never more than a few minutes away. At night, we'd sit out on a swinging bench on the porch, or on top of our window sill, and watch bugs or people float by in the lazy summer air. Somewhere out there, I promised, there was a garden laid out, waiting for us. A place where we already belonged. We became nomads. We rarely stayed anywhere more than a month or two before we heard of greener pastures through the grapevine. It didn't matter where we went; Nowhere we went was the Eden of my dreams. We found our place skipping from city to town to city, never spending more than half a year in any one place. We lived in apartments, cottages, and town houses. Wherever we found lots of people like us, there was still the same strife we'd left Cadasyia to escape in the first place. Some of those places were better than home, but none were that perfect home I'd dreamed of. It took us nearly four years before I was ready to admit that garden was nothing more than a dream. It was a bittersweet realization, at least. By the time we realized that we had to make do, we'd stopped looking for somewhere to live along any Lampeter lines, and found ourselves in Ferloon, two hours from Cadasysia by bus. Ferloon is far from perfect. Everything is too spread out, and the transit system is not reliable, and we still sometimes get strange looks from people who'd rather not have to see us. They're easier to ignore now that we're in a place where we've planted our roots. You have your photography group, the food pantry you volunteer at every week, your manager at the town newspaper, who's practically adopted you as her third child. I have my friends who I see at the community garden, my co-workers at the library, those paths that go deep into the woods which I can get lost in for hours. Who are they, to tell us we don't belong here? Why should their voices ring louder than those of the people who welcomed us into their homes. In all honestly, Ferloon is not all that different from the place we grew up in. The only real difference is that it lacks the baggage. The house that we live in could be better. It's always hot, and there are mice, and sometimes it feels a little cramped, since it's so far away from the center of town. It started to feel like home when you turned one of the rooms into a dark room, and when my plants started to appear in every corner of any given room. It started to feel like home when we got a new mattress, a real, expensive mattress that would be difficult to move or sell if we decided to up and move again. It started to feel like home when my dad came to visit, and I realized it was a lot easier to love the man now that we weren't under the same roof. There is no greenhouse for me to sleep in here. We have no porch. Our bedroom window overlooks a crumbling interstate, rather than a rolling field or bustling city street. Our home was not an untouched secret garden, just waiting for our arrival. With some work, we could build it to be something like that. But for now, it's just an unremarkable house, where you and I live together. That makes it home, even though it's far from perfect. I don't need perfection, as long as I can hold you when the lights go out. [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]