Sunlight seeps into her skin as earth packs in between the grooves of her fingertips and under her nails. She fills her lungs with clear air, air laced with the dust of the dirt she tills. One by one, she loosens the soil, slides her fingers in and underneath and gently lifts the weed out of the ground.
Weed is a funny word. Weeds are plants, too. But some context has deemed them unfit or dysfunctional or unwanted. Quinn has decided that really weeds are the unintentional plants in the garden. Maybe once they served a purpose but spun out of control. Or maybe they were intentional in someone else's garden and drifted over, now choking out what she really wants in her own.
It's a funny idea, her own garden. But after her counselor suggested it, freshman year, she found a community garden near her residential college and put herself on the waiting list. Anything, anything at all to stay here. To head toward launching, to head away from Lima. So, now that she has her plot, she spends time tending it every day. Every single day.
She still cringes a little when she hears that ripping sound that happens when she's left part of the root in the ground. Her mother would get frightened, her father furious, if she was so inexact.
"That's not weeding," he'd say, "It'll just come right back," he'd say. "Dig deeper and get all of it out. All of it!" He'd end up shouting, blustering, scaring her mother, and making Quinn remove all expression from her face, all feeling from her heart. Retreat was the Fabray women's specialty, a different flavor for each one.
But this is her garden.
If the roots rip, they'll come back later, giving her an opportunity to remove them again. In the meantime, the bright spots in the garden will be able to shine. It changes all the time, never static, always waiting for her to make the next move.
The blooming is inexorable. She planted bulbs last fall, and others planted bulbs every fall before. The bulbs multiply within the dirt, too, so there are blooms, one variety overlapping another, all spring and some of the summer. She knows it's biology, but she pretends it's magic. Because biology, like magic, is all around her, inexplicable, needing to be noticed to exist.
Like Rachel.
These feelings are new. They are strong. It's magic, almost, this deep sensation, not depression, not at all, just feeling all kinds of things deeply. Sure, there are tears at times, sometimes sad, but also sometimes joyful tears, and she rarely feels torn up. Sometimes she feels blown up, flown up, huge, wide, much larger than even when she was pregnant, expansive.
They are taking it slow.
But the major change, their acknowledgement of wanting to be close, is making all the difference. Dropping the drama between them has made it possible to go back to Drama, to feel her way into her parts, to act, to speak, to dream. She is not static. She no longer wishes for stasis. Changing, growing, blooming, one after another, making her garden hers. Deciding they want to be involved in each other's lives organically, yet intentionally, gives them a structure all the school and jobs didn't.
It's funny, weeding— she thinks she has an area clear of all the unintentional plants, shifts her perspective a bit, and finds a whole other crop. It used to make her angry, but now, it just seems like more opportunities to practice. Loosening the dirt, gently lifting the plant out, again and again, because it's not a finite thing to grow a garden, to grow a life. It changes. Constantly. Sometimes it's ugly, sometimes it's a mess, sometimes it needs water, or rest. But the best— sporadically ordered blooms, mostly intentional, shining in the sunlight.
This weekend Rachel will visit New Haven. Quinn still doesn't really know what either of them wants, other than being intentionally close. Sometimes she just wants to throw her arms around her. Sometimes she just wants eye contact. Rachel seems to drop her Broadway and her Gleek when they are together, a huge relief for both of them. They are just two girls at this point, two girls who want to be around each other.
An unintentional plant blew into her plot last year, and she left it to grow, just to see what it would become. It has broad fuzzy leaves, a stalk, and a round bud. And the round bud is starting to open now. By next week, its voluptuous coral pink bloom will be open, inviting. What luck that she managed not to extricate this one, this plant she thought was a weed, and with a shift of perspective, cultivated into a beautiful possibility.