When She Started Talking to Plants

This might sound odd, but I swear, I didn’t see it coming.

It started with the breakup messy, sudden, and nothing like the movies. Elizabeth and Dapo had been together for what felt like forever. She used to tell me he was her best friend, her peace, her “future husband.” That’s the part that hurts the most when someone makes you believe in forever and then leaves like they were never really there

One day he was helping her fix a curtain rod in her kitchen, and the next he was gone. No fight. No big drama. Just a two line message that said, “I can’t do this anymore. Please don’t call.”

Elizabeth broke. Not in a loud, dramatic way. She didn’t scream or throw his clothes in the street. No, she just… went quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you uncomfortable. The kind of quiet that makes you scared for someone.

I remember checking on her a few days later. Her eyes were swollen, but dry. She had that look like she hadn’t slept, like she’d been staring into space for days. I tried to talk, but all she said was, “I’m fine.”

She wasn’t

A week later, I went to her place again. That’s when I saw it. She was in her backyard, crouched down next to a potted hibiscus, talking in full sentences, softly, calmly, as if the plant was responding.

At first, I thought maybe it was a prayer. But when she turned and said, “This one gets me. She doesn’t judge,” I froze.

I didn’t say anything that day. I just sat with her, watered a few plants, and helped her move a sack of soil. But the next day and the next, I saw the same thing. Elizabeth had started talking to her plants like they were her friends.

She named them

The yellow tulip was "Grace." The aloe vera was "Chuka." The small lemon tree she planted from a seed? "Hope." She would say things like, “Hope isn’t growing fast, but she’s trying,” or “Grace doesn’t like too much sun, she’s sensitive.”

At first, I was worried. It all felt strange like she was slipping further away. But after a while, something changed. She started eating better. She began waking up early to tend to the garden. Her eyes became less empty. I started hearing her laugh again, sometimes at her plants, sometimes at herself.

One day, while we were re-potting her mint leaves, I asked, “Why the plants, Elizabeth?”

She looked at me and said something I’ll never forget:
“Because they grow. Even when no one claps for them. Even when they’re ignored. They still reach for the sun.”

That hit me

Maybe she wasn't talking to plants. Maybe she was just talking to herself, in a language that made sense. Maybe it was her way of putting broken pieces back together.

A few months passed. The garden looked like a small jungle, and Elizabeth looked like someone who had come back from the dead, stronger, softer, more aware of herself. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, Dapo came back.

He stood at her gate, holding flowers, real ones, like the kind you get at a roadside shop when you’re too lazy to think things through. He wanted to talk. Said he missed her. Said he had made a mistake.

Elizabeth let him in. She offered him water and sat with him under the shade of her lemon tree.

He talked for a while. Apologized. Explained.

When he was done, Elizabeth looked at him for a moment and said, “Do you know how long it takes to grow something from a seed? You abandoned what we had. But this” she pointed to her garden, “this stayed. This gave back.”

He left. Just like that. And she went back to watering “Grace.”

That’s the thing about Elizabeth. She didn’t just heal. She grew.

Now when I visit her, I listen too. I sit quietly as she hums to her plants. I laugh when she scolds Chuka for growing too wide. And I realize, it’s not madness. It’s love, redirected.

Sometimes the world breaks us in ways we don’t expect. And sometimes, the healing comes from the most unexpected places.

In Elizabeth's case, it came from the soil.

Image is Ai generated

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