I bought a plant today, a succulent that will grow green and great and fill the empty place on my clean wooden dresser. The place where every day I choose and unfold my clothes carefully hoping for the right combination to make me glow and be great until I’m irresistible.
And I know a succulent will suck everything from you and still go brown. Wither. Like some stubborn child who refuses to flourish even as you feed it your own heart. Some combination of the sunlight and water will always be wrong, or maybe the air, or there’s something lurking deep inside you, some repellant in your core that drifts out like DDT when you breathe and kills everything around you.
And here’s the truth. A succulent, especially a withered one, can never fill the space on my dresser. I put it there so I wouldn’t be the only living thing in my room on the nights when the space between me and another human seems to stretch till it reaches miles and miles and I’d die of hunger or thirst or a broken heart before ever reaching someone.
And here’s the real truth. The succulent can never fill the space on my dresser because the dresser and the succulent both aren’t real. I am using a writing tactic that the masters would call symbolism (/ˈsimbəˌlizəm/) or metaphor (/ˈmedəˌfôr/) which means using concrete images as a barricade against abstract feelings so the abstract feelings can’t creep on slippered feet through the elongating space between me and everything else and lace their bony hands and grimy fingernails around my neck while I’m asleep. It’s a writing tactic to keep me from choking.
But anyway, I bought a succulent today and it’s green and plump and I am so very happy.
Have you ever been on a mountain
with the wind blowing
the grasses and patches of wildflowers
and the sky dark and heavy
as grapes on vines
and the sun shining bright making one cloud
glow golden among the black
as if god came down with a beard and staff
and said that one cloud shall be golden
and you, one girl among the flowers and grasses
and the whole damn universe, shall see it?
And have you stood on a rock, the wind blowing
through your brain, blowing in flowers and the sun
and one thought? You are so damn deeply in love.
