I’m in the garden, watering my garden. Everything is going to be just fine

This story is part of Image issue 22, a meditation on the many definitions of the city’s favorite word: luxury. That is a meditation for me — I can just get lost pruning things and sitting in the garden and seeing all the new little flowers and the fruit. That’s what they’re doing after all the hard work: Pam Grier, Kelis — the girls are in the garden. In “Baby Boy,” Tyrese Gibson’s mom is in South Central in this garden that’s giving pergola and tomatoes and she’s just there smoking her cigarette, drinking her wine. Speaking on the anxiety I feel when I chill too hard, the images of me just laid out on the chaise in the garden reading Toni Morrison — I got that book for Christmas in 2019, the year that “The Source of Self-Regard” came out, but I haven’t been able to read much of it.