There’s an abandoned lot beside my bus stop, a barren block of concrete vacated after floodwaters swept the local businesses away

I’ve crossed this lot for years, at dawn with puffy red eyes and midnight with blisters on my feet

Lately I’ve noticed the lot has become alive

Patches of moss grow and stretch like slow moving amoebas

Weeds as tall as my waist burst through the grey sidewalk blocks like rockets

Vines crawl up and down the chain link fences, grasping desperately for my hair as I walk past

Seeds take root and grow in the smallest of cracks in the black tar

Maybe just one of every few hundred gets to reach its tendrils to the sky, but its obvious Mother Nature has created the hardiest of lives in delicate green forms

She has given all living creatures an amazing ability to heal and grow in the darkest of places and the darkest of times

I have a friend who’s two years younger than me

She says she spikes her morning coffee with whisky just to get through the day

She can count her friends on one hand, her failed classes on the other

She is afraid that she will always be this way

I was just like that too, at the bottom of a ditch that seems to grow deeper with each passing hour

But I tell her I climbed out

I tell her it’s okay to feel weak if you know you can be strong

Because within each of us is the same potential as every green sprout in that once empty lot

And maybe our hands will get dirty and it will take years to reach the surface, but I’ll be there to pull her up if she starts to slip

I want to show her Mother Nature has not forgotten she exists