The Rose that Grew from Concrete

For five years, I worked on a question that no one believed in. I was a Nobody, a Nothing that posed no threat, so they didn't care about me. How easy and languid a dismissal that was. I wasn't even worth keeping in the corner of their eye. I lay in the mud and watched them all take flight as I squeezed blood from a stone. And despite how small I felt, none of their stories interested me. I learned how to take pleasure from planting my flowers in the dirt, as I watched the trajectory of their hyperbole.

How carefully I tended my tiny garden in the earth. And now that this thing has come to fruition, they all suddenly want a piece. They all come around sniffing like dogs. In their earnest eyes I see their humanness and their fear. For although knowledge is not a zero sum game, the pursuit of it is. My tiny drop in the ocean–and still they will have it, still they will lay claim. Such children on the shore, and out there a meaningless sea.