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Let me preface this quickly: you are perhaps so-so, perhaps foolish, perhaps something not dissimilar to being optimistic.
You have always been obsessed with plants.
Young in your grandmother's backyard, you always reached for the hemlock beyond the fence.
You dream of it, sometimes. That hemlock.
On the lethality scale, it's nothing to write home about, but it's fuzzy white florets you find enthralling. Something about the way it sways in the wind.
In your dreams, it sways in the wind. Within your reach, this time. Urging you onward.
In your dream, there are enough stalks to weave into a basket with some extra to have for dinner.
Holding that basket under a low hanging oak, rested among the dirt and worms. Heart rabbit-quick, dizzy, eyes dilated.
You wake up with your eyes dilated.
You wake frazzled in bed.
Queen Anne's Lace looks like hemlock. Vaguely.
It's a symbol of sanctuary, however, not mortality. It does not kill.
There are zombies and you need somewhere to hide. Where do you look? For the lace, of course. That lacy curtain of refuge.
You need something to burn for your fire in the middle of the Arctic winter, what do you burn? The lace, of course.
You are drowning, forty-thousand feet below sea level, and you need something to breathe. It isn't possible to breathe a plant, but you manage it, and it works.
Because these are dreams.
You never forget that.
Or. You do, in the moment. But then you remember. Isn't that funny?
You need somewhere high up to sleep because the altitude messes with this hyper specific medical condition you've had the nightmare of acquiring. At night, you sleep on Queen Anne's Lace spanning a hundred feet tall, cradled in the white fluffiness of its rough little petals.
Then, you wake in bed, craving a hug.
Everything has that oregano tang, even your toothpaste.
You rip your tongue out, thick muscle, and your blood smells of it.
You can never escape what you want to. Persistent plant, stubborn plant. You're used to things like it.
In the kitchen, you cut beef on your wooden cutting board, and when you blink there is, in your hands, a thick wad of half shredded oregano leaves, still attached to the stems.
The humble ghost orchid watches you sleep.
It rests on the lily pad where the lily is meant to rest and it climbs the wall as vines are meant to do and it digs its roots into the foundation of your home.
It lives with you. It lives with you. You hate this plant. It haunts you.
Ephemeral ghost. Captive sailor.
You are alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean and your captain turns to you, materializing, just to scold you, just to stare at you with ghost orchids sprouting from his eyes.
You feel like a ghost orchid would eat your fingernails.
Which is ridiculous, because ghost orchids are nothing to worry over.
What really kills you is—
Twelve thousand six hundred and twenty four.
Mother of Millions.
As the raindrops, as the fish in the sea, as the ants in the neighborhood.
Mother of Millions.
You can't even quantify it.
In your dream, you go on your daily jog and trip over a hundred empty aluminum cans. In each can is a sprout of the mother of millions plant, and each and every one of them are hungry. Ravenous. Needful in the ugly way.
They grow and the eat the village, the town, the city, the county, the state. They eat you. They eat cats and dogs and women and children and four thousand pounds of American craft singles.
They take and they take and they take and they take.
And then they give back.
You can't comprehend the number of ways in which they give back.
How about it.
Some things sort themselves out.
Some things become a tangled heart of plant matter, housing a specialized species of hornet evolved in the short short time of two weeks to exist entirely symbiotically.
How about it.
You wake sweaty and confused.
Here is the secret, and I know you will not like it: that oleander tea was my fault.
I'm what's killing you.
I'm what's giving you these dreams.
Why? I feel like it. Why? Because I'm bored? Why? Because I can do a lot, and a lot can get boring.
Think of it like this: you are in the world's largest amusement park and you have the best fast-pass known to mankind. Sounds fun.
But you've been in this amusement park for the better part of your whole life, and you're a little sick of water, but you like what it can do when you push it to its limit.
So. I confess. The dreams were my doing.
I didn't stage them. It was you who did that. I just… stressed you out, some.
Yes. I was that tall shadow in your window. I was the dog barking at your back door in your fenced in backyard. I was the song at your grandmother's grave.
It's your fault. Really. It is.
You're… very fixated on these things. That's how I thought of the oleander. Enough sugar in an oleander syrup, and who could tell the difference?
Not you. That is… apparent.
Don't feel bad about this, really.
I'm just. Well, I don't know.
Yes. Yes. I can hold you. Of course I can hold you. I'd find it miserable not to.
You were… nice. I guess.
I liked our time together.