By Rosie Gailor

We didn’t even consider that we couldn’t have children until three years into trying. It was blameless; simple biology, low sperm counts, uninhabitable wombs. You never think of sperm in numerical terms, nor wombs through the lens of building codes until you want to have children, try to have children, worry why you aren’t already pregnant with your fifteenth child with all that worry and trying and wanting.

So, that was that. We closed the little dream of ours away in an empty VHS case which had stayed with us through multiple charity shop runs as well as two house moves from North to South London and back again. It only took up a small amount of space, and we didn’t let it take up more. Unlike the plants we have to rehome every year or so because of their ever-expanding roots.

So went our VHS case-sized baby adventure: we tried to have a baby and couldn’t. That was that, which it was thereafter referred to. “That.” The term became the past tense version of “it:” that terrible period or that whole mishap or that time.

Until that grew into not just that despite us never taking that out of its VHS case. I developed a hunger. Not for sex or hash browns, but for something in my belly; I felt empty, hollow, home to a chasm which I could no longer ignore. I didn’t know how to talk about it, not even with my partner, as they wouldn’t understand. I hadn’t heard anyone else speak about a chasm in their insides that echoed from emptiness and yearned for warmth, love, fulness. 

So this became the new that.

One Sunday morning, I woke up, made coffee, left a Post-it note with the time it was brewed, and left the house. I knew my partner’s alarm would be sounding shortly, and also knew that I would be back before they’d be on their second cup. I often popped out on Sunday mornings to get milk or other sundries, to get fresh flowers to replace the ones sagging on the windowsill, to walk to the park down the street and sit behind some trees to cry and cry and cry.

I walked to the garden center, a large, obtrusive building, all bright colors with cement flooring and shelves too high for any human being to reach. I went straight to the rotating shelves of plant seeds, opened as many sachets as I could fit in my hand, and swallowed every single mouthful.  

Immediately, I felt less empty. The hole inside of me spasmed from the second I swallowed the last seed, and I knew that with enough water and light, this chasm of want would achieve what my uterus could not. I smiled all the way home, hopeful the sun would shine down my throat and into my tummy. I only sipped water for the next few weeks, careful not to drown the seedlings.

When the first seed sprouted, I began to get gassy; by the fortieth, the chasm was no longer volatile, but calm. When they started to nestle into my organs, taking up as much room as they were able, I felt a vibration in my muscles like never before. The seedlings were most active at night. Even though my muscles twinged and twanged and caused me a great deal of sleeplessness, I felt happy. I was finally doing it, my emptiness finally full; it didn’t matter about the side effects of acid reflux and aching limbs. 

When the time came for the seedlings to enter the world, I lay down next to the trees in the park where I often cried and cried and cried and felt the roots tearing out of my fingertips, cracking my knuckles and clogging my veins, leaves erupting from my throat, skin tearing to release my beautiful garden; blooming, blooming, blooming.