I was born in a garden, so my mother used to tell me, because I always had a knack for gardening. Everyday after school, I would tend to my garden doing any the menial yet necessary chores. Making sure the eggplants got just enough water, weeding out all the pesky grass around the cucumbers, tilling the land with a hoe and pick to recycle the nutrients within the soil, and composting what I could to create an organic soil to use for my plants. 

I miss those days, when I could go to my garden and tend to it. After I'd get done with all the chores, I'd sit down on a old wooden bench next to my garden, enjoying the view of the setting afternoon sun gleaming out over my garden, but you know what the best part was? When the vegetables of my labor bore fruit. (Would that term be correct?) The plump tomatoes, the succulent eggplant, the crisp cucumbers. All that work would be worth it in the end since I also began to become interested in cooking.

Now that I'm all grown up now, in a cramped university dorm in the middle of the steel jungle, there has yet for me to cultivate another garden of my own. Everywhere I look, there's only concrete and cars to be found, yet the green thumb within me shrivels, malnourished and dying from the lack of any greenery around. Although for some reason, I feel like I've already began to cultivate a different type of garden for myself. One not of vegetation and soil, but of emotions and sentiments.

The soil I till now makes way for the small seeds of friendship that I plant which grow with every passing day, sprouting new opportunities and bearing the fruit of compassion. Every day the menial things I do with my life, have lasting impacts on all of my plants which then either flourish or slowly begin to wither away before they're either removed or revived, often at my own expense.

And at the end of the day, I can look back at the progress of my garden, with all of its different types of plants, each bearing similar yet unique attributes, before sitting down on my old wooden bench to watch the setting afternoon sun gleam out over my garden. Maybe I don't have my garden of vegetables anymore, but I know what I do have.

A Garden of Eden.