31. BIRTH AND DESTRUCTION ARE THE SAME THING
BIRTH AND DESTRUCTION ARE THE SAME THING
Inside of The Inflorescence, Olivia finds herself surrounded by gargantuan roses.
The flowers tower over her. Their thorns gleam and drip dew.
Delicate shiny grass tickles her feet. The pleasant aromatics of the roses embrace Olivia’s face in soothing waves.
A gentle breeze settles on the back of Olivia's neck.
Olivia closes her eyes, breathes deep and looks around to revel in the moment.
Multicolored hybrids and iridescent roses glitter under the room’s light.
The dome ceiling glows as sunlight pierces through pink and red stained-glass triangles.
Sap lines the walls of the room. It sparkles and emits a sweet odor.
Olivia lies on her back and buzzing riddles her ears, giving her goosebumps.
Bumblebees hop from rose to rose shaking delicate yellow and orange pollen onto Olivia.
The pollen fizzes on her tongue. It zaps her with a savory explosion of flavors.
Olivia calls it an umami tsunami and swallows it down with hot tea which she saturated with lemon and honey.
She sets her ear to the ground listening for earthworms squirming underneath.
Olivia digs for the shining worms and eats one.
It tastes like petrichor. She gently places the others in her pockets although she knows they will die on their way out.
Nothing growing inside of The Inflorescence can ever come out. It decays and turns into green ash.
Olivia housed her trinket collection in the room, in a far off corner which glitches on and off. Her trinkets are lined up like a tiny novelty army, hidden behind wide and speckled mojito elephant ears. They are joined by piles of books that Olivia carefully placed under fully bloomed ghost ferns.
When Olivia is inside of the Inflorescence, it’s as though Isela forgets about her, or perhaps Olivia doesn’t feel the need to tiptoe around.
Olivia is free to move her body how she wants, she’s free to make ugly sounds with her body, to let her body be.
She can say whatever she wants. She can scream her secrets. She can howl.
Olivia talks to the room as it shifts. There’s a moment when everything goes black between the changes.
Silence in the void. Then, a darkness so deep in the trenches, Olivia questions her existence every time.
Then, transformation. A hum. When The Inflorescence transforms from garden to forest to ocean water, Olivia holds conversations and spouts out secrets.
She requests to speak to the spirits of the land.
She demands warmth. The room responds through flowers or shrubbery or silhouettes of high-rise buildings made of neon flower petals and lanky moss.
It brings in different species of butterflies and moths.
Western tiger swallowtails. Comet moths.
Malachite butterflies. Lime hawk-moths. Monarch butterflies.
It gives what Olivia interprets as gifts.
She leaves pieces of herself behind as reciprocation.
She cuts her hair and sprinkles it on the floor or she buries it in the earth.
She cuts her nails and sticks the remnants of her hands into cracks in the walls.
When she menstruates, she offers blood and the clots that drip down her legs.
At one point, she found all of her baby teeth and left them in the rounded hollow of a twisting beech tree that sprouted in the room one morning.
She leaves as much as she can offer of herself in the room.
When she leaves The Inflorescence, she loves to describe the ever-changing environment to the oak trees.
The oak trees shake their leaves and explain that they can hear everything.
The squirming and morphing of roots and matter.
The crackling of a new ecosystem. It sounds like birth and destruction.
Olivia argues that both are the same thing.
Inside of The Inflorescence, Olivia spins and dances and climbs impossible trees.
She free falls from cliffs brimming with trilobite fossils.
She digs into the earth and buries herself.
She sleeps underneath and watches as her nails grow from keratin into spiraling translucent shells.
Her hair turns to stringy white mycelium.
Her muscles hollow out and melt into the soil.
Her bones explode into a fine dust. When she reemerges from below the mossy floorboards of The Inflorescence, she’s slimy and shining and slick.
In the fetal position on the ground, a neon yellow goo spews from her mouth.
Olivia coughs until everything is out of her system.
A rebirth.
She stretches her limbs. She gathers some of the goo into her palms and buries it.
A poppy bursts out. She understands. She will be able to escape soon.
Her mother will stay behind and The Inflorescence will stay behind and the oaks will stay behind, but she can move forward. She can move forward without them.