When I was young I said I didn’t want to be a boy or a girl, I wanted to be a plant. I had never been a go-getter but the want grew to be bigger than my body. I held it inside of me as it festered, as it grew up the trellis of my ribs. So I held jungle geraniums under my tongue and spoke spells through the mouthful. I pricked my index finger with every spike on a small cactus, one after the other. I licked the strange milky-white sap dripping off of broken leaves on my grandmother’s ficus. I knelt on a bed of perennial peanut grass and twisted their yellow flowers until the stems weakened, gave up, fluttered downward. Nothing came of these. For a more traditional approach I ate apple cores, gnawed on mango pits, stole vegetable scraps from under my mother’s elbows in the kitchen so I could spoon the seeds of sweet bell peppers directly into my mouth. Nothing came of these, either. I decided if I couldn’t be a plant I could maybe be a terrarium. So I started eating turtle vines. Scraped moss off of walls with my teeth. Swallowed a small pink fittonia cutting, tiny white roots and all. I started taking spoonfuls of lush brown dirt from the garden like medicine, once in the morning and another in the evening. I took perfect white pebbles and shiny little rocks. I told my mom I needed activated charcoal for school and took that, too. And drank a lot of pondwater, seasoned with duckweed. I convinced myself I was growing translucent, my brown skin turning gray and clearing up little by little. I convinced myself I was becoming a self-sustaining ecosystem, wholeness layered like onion scales or nesting dolls or a ripe banana heart. I convinced myself it was working. After a while it was clear that I was lying, that still nothing had come. I wasn’t giving up, though. If I couldn’t become a terrarium I could maybe be mulch. I sipped the brown juice gathered in the bottom of buckets of compost, shredded and ate the dead leaves my grandfather swept up from the garden, took wood chips and bark and sawdust and cardboard, took rice hulls and newspaper and powdered seashells, took straw and hay and grass clippings and gravel. And then I laid my body down on some good, wet soil and waited. I thought—perennial peanuts. Jungle geraniums. Touch-me-nots, asters, rose mallows, pigeonwings, arrowheads, bird’s-nests. Citronella, silvergrass, carabao grass, goosegrass, dropseed. In wilder dreams—rafflesia. Nepenthes, sundews, bladderworts. In miracles—a mangrove swamp. I believe in noble causes. In self-actualization. In active pursuit. I am no longer so young. I am convinced I am becoming, becoming. I am going to die this way, I know, but it won’t be forever. Everything inside of me must one day come out.
Zoe Adrien Lapa is a microblogger first and an author second. You can find their work on Tumblr via @blubbed or in places like Haunted Portal, Palette Global, Exist Otherwise, and elsewhere.