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ARCHIVIST
Statement of Aster Gilpin, regarding... her garden. Original statement given February 14th, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)
I've always liked gardening. Not the traditional sort --- the kind where all you get out of it is some froofy little flower or your typical fruits and veg --- but... yeah. Something about it just called to me. The interconnectedness is what does it. The way the whole environment just fits, like a puzzle that only works right if it all works right. I mean, it's all well and good if you can take a pot or some such, toss in a few seeds and some fertiliser, and make something grow, but real gardening --- proper gardening --- is an art.
I've always liked mushrooms. They know when you're walking by, you know: try to bring you close by reaching out, seeding the air with their spores and taking root. We have fungal spores in us all the time and you'd hardly ever know. Isn't that fascinating? Intriguing? Compelling? Some people think they may even have souls and how brilliant would that be? A network of tiny, sentient roots, sprawling beneath the surface of the earth, feeling our footsteps and knowing us. Seeking us out. Filling us. How much understanding must there be, unrecognised, in a single patch of fungus?
I like vines too, of course, though some are better than others. My mum once took a trip to America for a conference and took photos of the kudzu they've got there and, oh, it was gorgeous. Not like the pitiable little vines we've got here, either: pretty in their own ways, but scrawny and fragile; these were great, strapping vines, spiralled all up and down those trunks, embracing and killing all at once. Kudzu is so invasive that they're everywhere, choking whole forests just by existing, clinging so closely you can barely see them if you move past too quickly. It was brought in to control erosion, but it wouldn't leave. It ate the South.
Anyway, the point is, a real garden isn't about what you can make of it. It's about what it can make of itself.
And I always wanted that. For me, I mean. I know it sounds daft --- I want to be a mushroom because it knows you before it even starts to become you --- but I did. I do. And it's been hell over the years, because even my best mates don't get it. I don't think they ever will. They're normal. They're not jealous of body-bound closeness and they don't ache for something more than proximity. They don't yearn for inseparability: two parts of a whole, boundaries blurring until you have to squint to even see traces of the lines. I always have. One day.
But that's the problem, innit? Cause I can work in my garden all day and make the prettiest works of art that you've ever seen and... and nothing. Vines paired with trees to sap their strength from the outside in, and networks of mycelia nattering back and forth, and... me.
Just me.
Alone.
It's not an accident, I know that. No cosmic coincidence or fateful cock-up. Whether I knew that back then or not, I can't recall, but I'm quite aware now. For how desperately I wanted to be known and loved --- inside and out, at such a level as to be called atomic and such a degree as to be termed obsession --- it's not in the cards.
"Maybe one day," I bet you're thinking, but nah, I'm not a blooming idiot. I never even wear a mask, you know. All those spores in the air and so many of them toxic --- lovely little buggers that take root in your lungs and choke them out, that get into your heart and bones to nest, that seek only to propagate at any cost --- but they've never, not once, affected me. I wouldn't mind --- more than wouldn't mind; would welcome it as it destroyed me --- but all the same: I shall never be a home. Shall never feel love grow, visceral and inseparable between my bones.
And then I met her. Angelica. A fitting name for her. She was a right proper lady, she was --- not in title, or anything, but spirit --- and she liked my flowers born of death, my monuments to parasitism, my death-slaked mushrooms. She looked out at them as if they're not just mistaken distortions of what a real garden should be. She looked at them the way I've wanted someone to every bleeding year since I started.
And I knew --- in my hollow, unmarked bones waiting to be filled; in my untarnished lungs and unconsumed heart --- that she was the one. I loved her. Deep in my half-a-soul where I am empty enough to be a home, I loved her. And that love grew, more than I could have hoped. It started in my lungs: that short-of-breath feeling you always hear about, except this was deeper. More physical, more real, twisting out among alveoli and twining along bronchi. Then my chest: pressure just over my heart --- stabbing pain too ephemeral to really hold, to really know, here one breath and gone the next --- like a heart attack but so much more because I knew what it meant. Knew that I had finally found love by which I might be consumed. I mourned only the fact that the feelings were too fleeting to hold, to feel, to savour, but I knew, too, that I could change that if I only doubled-down. Committed.
We were different, though. Too different to rightly work, to be one without distinction. She talked the part of a lady and I didn't. Looked all refined and posh, with delicate grace that made me think of pleated inkcaps and wisteria vine. And I was hardly her type yet: all dark hair and stocky build from the gardening, very much not like the gentle, lithe, long-haired waifs she preferred.
But that was okay, far as I figured. Tongues are easy to change. (A lengthening of the syllables, that's all; a widening of the mouth. A quick alteration of the voicebox.) Faces are less so, but they can be done. (Gone the swarthy skin, the pitted scars; hello, sun-estranged skin and long, curled locks and poise just like hers.) It's hard to stop, once you start. Hard to know when you've become her enough. Hard to find the delineation between you and her, eventually. (Though I figure that's the point, isn't it?)
You're still you, though. Still the same. Still alone. A corrupted shell is not a home --- not without someone to fill it --- and even the act of consuming her is not enough to fix that bone-deep loneliness. Besides, once you've become her --- eliminated the difference between the two of you, made you utterly the same --- then she is just another part of you. And you've always known yourself too well, only ever needed someone else to know you. She did not know you until you had become her, and so she has never known you --- never seen you --- which means that again I am alone. Always and forever alone within this shell that I call mine but wish to share. A reflection, now, and nothing more. Signifying nothing.
There are many plants in a garden, though, and many people that I may know so closely.
I met a girl today named Clara. She is as I once was: older and sun-weathered. No gold hair in ringlets for her, nor soft jumpers or smartly pressed dresses, but dark hair cropped close and stained overalls. She does not look like Angelica, but she bears the same fascination in her eyes as I saw in Angelica's and I know that I love her. We are meant to be one. I feel it growing again, that certainty, every time I see her. Tearing through my lungs and choking the space around my heart and crawling up my spine. My love grows within me and, for all I know that I will not be loved by her in any way that matters, I know that she is mine and I am her.
Or I will be. One day.
ARCHIVIST
Statement ends.
Well. An odd one, that. Corruption, of course, though not entirely. The Strangeness of becoming someone else, perhaps? Shifting forms and moulding Flesh? Spiralling over wanting what can never be? Perhaps Gerard was right; perhaps I'm dwelling too much on the divisions, the categories. Perhaps trying to categorise them fully is just another fool's errand.
Even so, how odd it is that she so willingly embraced her path and yet is not permitted to pursue it. Her fate: the decay of that which she loves by her own hand, rather than her own destruction by that which loves her. It makes sense, of course, and yet serves as another reminder of how insidious these powers are. If they even know what they're doing, that is. Perhaps --- loathe as I am to say it --- Leitner was right and they simply... don't. Perhaps it has always been us projecting onto them meaning, will, desire. Making hell out of other people in the name of things we cannot hope to comprehend.
Cursory attempts at research have yielded no traces of Miss Gilpin or her... companions, I suppose... though I cannot say that this is a great shock; no doubt her status as avatar is complicating the mere attempt. Regardless, I also see no likely connection to the Unknowing... Another of Gertrude's misfiled statements, I suppose. Another worry for later.
Recording ends.
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