Love: Sentimental Things from the Past

Have you witnessed other people’s happy life? Did you wish you were them? Or did you envy their
picturesque dates and celebrations? When we see other couples, other families who share their romantic
moments with one another, we often tend to compare our lives to theirs and ask ourselves why aren’t those
things happening to us. We set what we see on others as the only standard of happiness: of love.

Edith Tiempo’s profound poem “Bonsai” gives us a glimpse of how the speaker typifies love. The
concept of love is widely vague and reliant on the person himself. This means that love can mean one thing
to you and another thing to somebody else yet it does not necessarily mean that theirs are much better or
even any less.

In the first stanza of the poem, it gives us our wishful thinking: to be able to keep the one’s we love
within arms’ reach. Over time, we have had our first crush, our childhood friends, our squad and our
families. These people gradually came into our lives and made us love them. Yet just because we love them,
doesn’t mean they’ll stay. Loving them does not actually guarantee their presence in our lives forever. It is
in our nature to grow: and we bloom differently. We grow apart and will soon all go our separate ways,
eventually. This is why the one’s we care about is represented as something we could keep around and
something we could effortlessly find in the first stanza.

In the next part, certain objects are mentioned: the ones we can simply keep. If you think about it,
these things turn out to be tangible representations of our love to others. I remember one time, I bought my
lover a new wallet: inside the wallet is a hundred peso bill with the date of purchase written and a short
message. He’s a seafarer so he’s away most of the time. One night, after almost two years, he took a picture
of the bill and the vivid memories of that day came to life. In relevance to the poem, this tells us that love
isn’t actually impossible to literally hold. Love is not fully abstract. Love is a dried rose petal and a chocolate
wrapper closed within the pages of a book. Love is a bus ticket and a polaroid picture from a photobooth.
Love can be a thing we shared on a certain day of our lives.

Then, in the third and fourth stanza, the acknowledgment of our heart’s ability to suppress all the
emotions and all the love we feel is emphasized. Generally, we romanticize love as something so powerful
that no one could ever hope to subdue. Yet when you see that little pot of “Bonsai” tree given to you by
your late grandmother, you don’t go crazy. Instead, you take a moment to look at it as you hold your happy
heart with memories that conjure up your best smile.

Taking everything into account, this poem is about a contrary concept of love. Since love is assumed
as something intangible and out of control, we fail to see love in a lot of things, of places and of moments.
Fortunately, this poem gives us the opportunity to realize that love is not gone just because the people are
far away or out of reach. Love can simply be the sentimental things that reminds us of them and the love
we shared.