Pretty Please, (Sleep Tight) — A Retrospective Essay

Pretty Please, (Sleep Tight)— A Retrospective Essay
One by one the grass grows. Day by day the plantation heightens. Tall enough to hover over us as if in control, we cut them down.

Each day passes by as these mundane routines carry on. Subconsciously, we have taken notice of them. We have acknowledged their existence and coexist.

But what if one day it all stops? What if we get so consumed by our own lives we forget to care. The grass we “know” will never get any taller than a child, the weeds almost never in sight, flowers trampled and skewed.

Surely it would not go unnoticed. As we slowly find a mundane beauty and comfort in them, how could we not notice? Yet we see the poorly groomed landscape not because of their cries, but because we are disturbed. Again out of our own convenience, only then do we notice a bruise, scab, or sore.

As nihilistic as I would like to continue to be, maybe we also notice because we care. Over-towering weeds maintained because we care about the flowers, grass fresh because it looks the happiest green.

Maybe the routine that we have established is not solely out of human convenience but concern. That we found beauty in these mundane things because we cared. That we could be comfortable because we cared.

Maybe bigger than ourselves, the biggest comfort we can find here is caring outside of us. Outside of the dreamed-of status, awards, conferences— there is a field of wildflower buds awaiting spring.

That as volatile as our lives come to be, these weeds will be plucked. The flowers will grow. The grass will be trimmed.

Only throughout time these routines have not stopped, and I would like to believe the reason being we have never stopped caring.

All images were taken by author.