The Night I Started Burying Things That Weren't Dead Yet

The Night I Started Burying Things That Weren't Dead Yet

There's dirt under my nails again and I don't remember when it stopped feeling like failure. Maybe it was the third week, maybe the fifth, maybe the morning I woke up and realized I'd walked to the bin without thinking about it first—just carried the coffee grounds and the orange peels and the evidence of another day I survived out to the corner where the earth takes everything I can't keep.

I didn't start composting because I cared about the planet. I started because I needed one single thing in my life that made sense when nothing else did. One ritual I could perform that had a beginning and a middle and an end that didn't involve apologizing or explaining or pretending I was fine when the room smelled like I was rotting from the inside out. Scientists say there's bacteria in soil that releases serotonin—the same chemical my brain stopped making on its own somewhere between the diagnosis and the night I sat on the kitchen floor and couldn't remember why I'd opened the fridge. Maybe that's why my hands stopped shaking when they were dirty. Maybe that's why the only place I felt calm was on my knees with my fingers in something that knew how to turn death into food.

The bin was cheap. Plastic. Ugly. I bought it at the hardware store on a Tuesday when I couldn't afford therapy and couldn't afford to keep waking up feeling like this. I put it behind the gate where nobody could see it and nobody could ask me what I was doing, and I started adding things: carrot tops, eggshells, the outer leaves of lettuce that looked too tired to save, tea bags still warm from the cup I forgot to drink. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew that throwing things away felt like giving up, and burying them felt like hope I didn't have to name.

Grief is supposed to decompose, they say. You're supposed to process it. Work through it. Let time do its thing. But nobody tells you it doesn't break down in a straight line. Nobody tells you some days it smells sweet like rain on leaves and some days it reeks like vinegar and rot, and you have to open the lid anyway and turn it and add more browns and trust that the smell will change if you just keep showing up. I learned to read the pile the way I learned to read my own body: by paying attention to what it couldn't say out loud. If it slumped, it needed structure. If it dried out, it needed tenderness. If it started to stink, it needed air.

I read somewhere that composting is alchemy—the magic that changes mourning into fertile ground, sadness into something life can grow from again. I didn't believe it at first. I thought it was hippie bullshit for people who hadn't actually lost anything real. But then I harvested the first batch—six months after I started, maybe seven, I don't remember because time moved differently when I was turning the pile—and it fell through my fingers like dark snow, and it smelled like the forest floor after a long rain, and I cried. Not because it was beautiful. Because it was proof that things could rot and still become something useful. That I could take all the shit I couldn't stomach and all the scraps I couldn't fix and all the days I thought I'd wasted and turn them into something the garden wanted.

Horticultural therapy, they call it. Trauma-informed gardening. Evidence-based emotional grounding through contact with soil. I didn't know those words when I started. I just knew that when my hands were in the dirt, my nervous system stopped screaming. When I was pulling weeds or turning compost or burying the day's failures under a layer of shredded leaves, I wasn't locked in fight-or-flight anymore—I was just here, in my body, doing one small thing that didn't require me to be better than I was. The pile didn't care if I showed up in my pajamas at noon or if I'd showered or if I could explain why I was crying while I buried banana peels. It just took what I gave it and kept working.

People who study this stuff say gardening restores your ability to live in the present moment. That it calms the parts of your brain that trauma keeps locked in freeze mode, that it gives you back a sense of control when everything else feels like it's happening to you instead of with you. I don't know if that's what happened to me. I just know that somewhere between the coffee grounds and the crushed eggshells and the apple cores I kept adding every morning, I started noticing things again. The way light changed on wet leaves. The sound the fork made when it hit good compost versus bad. The exact moment steam started rising when I turned the pile on a cold morning. Small things. Survivable things. Things that didn't ask me to be healed, just present.

I still don't know what I'm doing half the time. I still add too many greens and the pile gets sour and I have to fix it with cardboard and patience. I still forget to turn it for two weeks and come back to a slumped, matted mess that smells like I feel on bad days. But I also know now that nothing I add to that bin is wasted. Not the scraps, not the failures, not the days I can barely get out of bed but still manage to carry one small bowl of peelings out to the corner where the earth does what I can't: takes the rot and makes it clean.

The first time I spread finished compost on a bed and planted seeds in it, I didn't expect them to grow. I expected them to sense the grief baked into the soil and refuse to cooperate. But they grew anyway. Tender and green and unbothered by the fact that the ground they were rooting into used to be my worst days mulched down and turned into something softer. And I stood there with dirty hands and thought: maybe I can do that too. Maybe I can take all the things that didn't work and all the versions of myself I couldn't keep and bury them somewhere quiet and wait.

Composting taught me that transformation doesn't look like what I thought it would. It doesn't look like suddenly being fixed or suddenly being whole. It looks like showing up to a bin in the corner of the yard with another day's worth of scraps and saying: I don't know what this will become, but I'm here, and I'm turning it, and I trust the process even when it smells like death. It looks like getting your hands dirty and letting bacteria you can't see release chemicals in your brain that make you feel like maybe—just maybe—you're allowed to be okay again.

I carry a bowl from the kitchen now without thinking. I lift the lid. I add what I can't keep. I cover it with leaves. I close the bin and walk back inside, and somewhere under the surface, in the dark warm center where the microbes are working, the alchemy is happening whether I believe in it or not. Grief becoming soil. Soil becoming life. Life becoming the reason I get up tomorrow and do it all over again.