stealing beauty

stealing beauty

I crave nostalgia, though I’ve grown remarkably inept at predicting the past. Out loud, I speak into my notebook how we share places that you’ve never even visited, the remarkable ability of technology to defy the space-time continuum. It is a continuum that shows remarkable cruelty, especially over the telephone, where you let me once linger on the line until it was time to make a choice, and I chose poorly, but decisively, nevertheless. And you signed on the dotted line until years later when I kept reliving the good times you asked, then why not go back to the way things used to be? I thought, we’re not so wired for forgiveness that way. And you followed, then why relive it at all? And I thought, we’re wired for cravings.

About this time, several years back, I was put in charge of an ordinary houseplant that suffered from the floral equivalent of elephantiasis. A dracaena fragrans, some 10 feet over its expected height. I wrestled with ungainly limbs, yellowing leaves and untilled soil. But mostly I wrestled with co-workers who begged me to prune the goddamned thing, and I always thought about the David’s Phlox and Sedum we coppice every year, but those are outdoor plants with room to grow. This, as the old saying goes, was something entirely else.

I stayed late one night, and the darkness of the Evergreen State College campus is profound and lonely when viewed from behind the windows of a well-lit office. I knew a girl back then, an artist who turned every head but always came to my door, and I wondered if she had tricked the locks because the room was full of jasmine and nutmeg. No one came. At the exit, I looked up at the dracaena and saw that it had flowered.

For a week, the flower released its fragrance at 5:45 every night, long after everyone had gone home. “How come you keep working so late?” was answered by cryptic shrugs. Who the hell stays late for a flower?

A week later, a co-worker made a grand entrance into my office, a pair of scissors in one hand, the dracaena’s flower in the other. “I thought you would like to know! That I took the liberty of! Cutting the flower from the plant! (SHE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW ITS NAME) The flowers drain its energy, you know!”

She laid the petals on my desk and left before I could commit murder/suicide. She was crestfallen when I saw her next, “HOW COULD YOU,” I said with my eyes. WHY WOULD YOU.

I’ve since written you letters, and then edited out any question marks. It’s the interrogatives that strain the relationship, like so many flowers that spend their days in silence, steeling themselves for the knife. These days, it seems, I'm content to let everything run its course.