My Secret Garden

by Thomas Healy

The other day I called up this person who let me down and shouted at him until he hung up on me. I was so angry I was incoherent, spewing obscenities instead of sentences. And then I became terribly embarrassed, never having spoken to anyone like that before on the telephone. "There are secret gardens in all of us," Nietzsche observed, which he thought of as volcanoes waiting to "have their hour of eruption." My garden is dormant most of the time, a rough patch concealed deep in a corner of my heart. But every so often it becomes exposed and always I am filled with regret for being such a poor custodian of my emotions.

6S

Thomas Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. His essays have appeared in such online journals as Cosmoetica, Ducts, and The Umbrella Journal.