Hyacinths

Today reminded me of a poem I wrote two years ago, when my life had quite literally fallen apart in a way I never thought was possible. I had forgotten about it, buried under all the other well meaning or haphazard poems I have lodging in an old Google Document.

It’s also been very easy to forget about that poem because my life has transformed so quickly in the past two years. I graduated college, moved out of a city, began working as an adult, met the love of my life and married him, and I’ve been ping ponging around careers trying to figure out what I can do for the rest of my working life…it’s been a very full, transformative two years.

And as I sit in my husband and I’s apartment in Vermont, hearing the rain hit the windows that look out at a little wood where we enjoy hearing the birds sing, it’s very easy to choose to forget that poem and where I was almost two years ago this April. There was once a time when I didn’t believe a day would pass when I wouldn’t have to dwell on what had happened, how my life had blown up in my face so quickly. But it happened. Impossible, it seems, in the moment that pain and suffering can someday recede. But now I am here, two years later, and I’m beginning to see the truth in “time heals all wounds.”

That may be a little simplistic, of course. If you’re a human and you’re reading this, I can almost guarantee you’ve experienced some kind of deep hurt or failure or suffering in your life, so you must also know that while time does heal wounds, there are still scars that are tender to the touch. You heal, but one day you run across some sort of reminder of that past hurt and all of a sudden your heart is pounding and that scar is recalling the time it was fresh and open and bleeding.

I was trimming hyacinths in the morning when this happened, when a little memory prodded a long-forgotten feeling I once lived with every day, a dreaded weight I had fervently prayed would ago away forever.

Hyacinths, the flowers I found myself trimming, have carried a curious meaning throughout history. Studying literature and poetry in college, the flower had popped up more than occasionally, such as in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or the Apollo and Hyacinthus myth. People have attributed different meanings depending on the color of the flower: blue means care, yellow means jealousy, purple mean forgiveness, and so forth. In college, these flowers were on my mind as a student, writer, and reader as I went about my life.

Funny, it seemed to me a little bit later, as I was laying in my parent’s guest room and my mother had brought me hyacinths to efforts to cheer my spirits after she had rescued me from my own destruction. That was two years ago this April. Two years ago I almost didn’t finish my bachelors -and we’re talking about a month short of graduation here- because I fell into a deep state of (at that time, newly diagnosed) depression. Unfortunately it was a long time coming, but when you yourself are not attuned or familiar with the signs of depression and neither are the people surrounding you, it can consequently build up to the point of extreme destruction.

Two years ago was a dark, scary place. I had to go back home to my parents during a time when most of peers were celebrating nearing the finish line of college. I had to unlearn a self-taught lesson that taking antidepressants was a sign of weakness. I had to grapple with the shame and guilt I felt in light of dropping all of my responsibilities in the face of my mental health, which included jobs, student leadership, finals, amongst other obligations. Some of my friends stopped talking to me. I had to learn how to talk about my feelings, and how to appropriately act in response to those feelings. I lost my ability to pray and I felt as though God had gone silent. I had to learn to be stop and be still even when the rest of the world was moving full steam ahead. My mom had to motivate me to do the simplest of tasks, like I had transformed back into a toddler. It was a constant whirlpool of fear, shame, hopelessness, anger, and apathy, and for a time I never thought I’d get out of it.

“My mother brought my hyacinths…” that’s the line that sparked this entire poem. I had been home only for a week when she brought me these beautiful, pink hyacinths and placed them on the night stand next to my bed, almost like an offering. When they bloomed, their fragrance filled the entire room. If I closed the door I felt overwhelmed by it, and they are what made me recall all those references to hyacinths in my prior studies.

It was raining outside when I wrote this poem laying on the floor, looking up at the flowers I had only heard others much better than me write about. Poetry has served me in different ways throughout my life, and during that particular period it was a way to make sense of what was going on inside of me; which, for the most part, I was at a complete loss. And thank God for poetry, because otherwise I’m not sure where any of these thoughts would’ve gone.

Now, when I see hyacinths, such as the ones my husband brought to me the other day, I do not see jealously or innocent love or sadness. These are what I used to associate with the flower, what others have told me to think about it. What I now see is an old friend, one that bloomed beside me in the middle of my darkest night, and continues to rise up alongside me every April.

They Say

Written by Emily Smyth in April, 2022