“I used to help my dad in the garden,” I said.

He smiled then, and pointed to a door in the side of the fence that I hadn’t seen before. “Come on in,” he said.

My father had been a gardener too, an amateur one. Your gardenvariety gardener. When I was young, he cultivated our front yard so that one half was filled with flowers, and the other with vegetables and herbs. When he was in a good mood, I was sometimes allowed to help him weed or plant; both left me filthy and tired, but I liked to lock fingers with the root systems as I pulled them out of the ground. “Imagine the garden as your mind,” he would say as we knelt in the dirt. “If you plant seeds, and tend the earth around them, they bear fruit. And just like your mind, the flowers are constantly changing. They rise, they bloom, they decay.”

“What’s the point, then?” I asked him once. “Why grow things that only die?”

He leaned on his shovel. “Everything is impermanent. Mountains. Flowers. Even us, what we think of as ourselves.”

I looked down at my stomach, my knees. I held up my bitten fingernails.

“Let me ask you this,” my father said. “Where is the self? Can you point to it? Can you tell me what color it is? No, not your sternum. Not your eye. Your Olivia.” I could point to nothing that would satisfy him. “You see,” he said, and I nodded as though I did.

It wasn’t until much later that I understood that the things he said had anything to do with Buddhism, or that others might not subscribe to his worldview. Most of the girls at my school believed that they had eternal souls, for instance. Most of the girls at my school knew that true love, when they inevitably found it, with eyes and thighs like theirs, would last forever. Most of the girls at my school, if they had ever thought about it, which they had not, would have been confident that they actually existed. From a young age, I suspected these things to be not strictly true. This may or may not have contributed to my essential loneliness.

After my father left, the garden grew wild. The two halves, edible and decorative, became indistinguishable. Some plants died, others grew tentacles, and the front yard of what was now my mother’s house became a mass of curling vine and leaf and stiff dead stalk. The neighbors scowled when they passed, but my mother said she liked it better this way. “Back to the land!” she shouted happily one morning when she found a litter of foxes fighting in the deep brush, the kits pawing at a small kill their own mother had brought them, smearing its red pulp onto the grass.

Needless to say, I never invited anyone to my house. This may or may not, etc.