I’m walking past this tiny patch of dirt on 4th street, just a couple of wooden crates and some pathetic-looking tomatoes tied up with twine, and the smell of the wet soil just HITS me like a physical blow except it doesn't actually hurt it just feels like someone turned the volume up on a frequency I forgot existed. I’m standing there in these $400 heels that are absolutely killing my arches because I spent nine hours today in a glass box optimizing things that don't even exist, literally just shifting numbers from one cell to another while my soul slowly leaks out of my ears and all I can think about is how my dad used to smell like manure and woodsmoke and how much I HATED that when I was twenty. I remember telling him I was meant for BIGGER things, that I wasn't going to spend my life worrying about the first frost or if the blight was going to take the heirloom crop, and he just looked at me with those hands that were basically made of leather and nodded like he already knew I was full of it. I wanted the city, I wanted the noise and the Michelin stars and the feeling of being CRITICAL to the infrastructure of the world, so I ran away to get my MBA and never looked back because I was so damn sure that "legacy" meant a corner office instead of forty acres of soil that actually FEELS like something when you dig into it. Now I'm here, I’ve got the title and the apartment with the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over a sea of concrete and I'm looking at this community garden and I realize I don't feel anything, not even regret, just this profound hollowness that's almost funny if you think about it long enough.