We met when he was a seedling. After nineteen years in the seed pod, he had finally cracked into the sunshine.
We went to the supermarket—he wanted to find orchids. He picked up each little plastic pot and brushed the medium away with delicate fingers. “They force the orchids to bloom, and it kills them,” he said. He inspected the roots.
When an orchid is ready to bloom, it produces a spike. The spike supports the blooms as they hang from their fragile stems. To make an orchid bloom, you can be patient and treat it right, or you can overwhelm it with excess fertilizer. If you’re patient, the plant lives quietly for most of its life, blooming in its time and resting after. If you overwhelm it, the plant grows hard and fast, the fertilizer at first feeding and then burning it with chemical fire. It will bloom and burn out, withering to dust and ash.
He held up a phalaenopsis with breathtaking pale pink flowers. Beneath the medium, the roots were yellowing and wrinkled.
He said, “This one is sad, but savable if we treat it right.”
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An orchid seems such a delicate thing. To a human, they’re impossibly fussy—to thrive, they need perfect water, perfect light, perfect temperature, perfect humidity.
They only seem so delicate because they are satisfied with restraint, happy with adequacy. They’ve evolved to survive on a sip of water, a nibble of nutrition, a glimpse of sunlight.
Humans do not do simplicity. Humans are a flood, a feast, an incandescence.
An orchid will accept their abundance—what creature could refuse it?—but die in the acceptance.
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When he was a seedling, he grew fast and hard. He was green and vibrant and striving and alive. He stretched his roots into nook and crevice, grasped hard to hold himself in his home, grew little leaves to gather light. He was sad, but savable if we treated him right.
He was supple and smooth—impossible not to touch.
Everyone wanted their lips on him.
Everyone put their lips on him.
It’s okay—abundance doesn’t ask.
Everyone wanted so badly for him to bloom for them. His small, firm body would surely produce something beautiful if he was given the right attention. They poured into him all the love a human can give—flood, feast, incandescence.
None were satisfied with restraint. How could they be? Who could justify giving mere adequacy to something that showed such promise?
He acquiesced to their abundance.
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When he was filled to bursting with abundance, he raised a spike: a strong cord, red and satin, coiled and thrown over a rafter. He slithered it around his throat, supporting the bloom everyone had tried so hard to grow, letting it hang from its fragile stem.
The next time I saw him, he was ash.
Erin Grace (she/they) is a queer, Indigenous (Chetco/Tututni) writer from the Pacific Northwest. They love to swim so much that it should be no surprise the salmon are her cousins. According to their gramma, they’ve been writing since before they could read, copying books longhand. “Bloom” is her first publication.