Letter to a Plant

To the withering, glaucous invalid in the corner of the kitchen counter,

Yes, you.

I admit that the conditions in our house are rather deplorable for the flourishment of even the hardiest of plants.  Even with the shutters fully opened and positioned in an optimal angle for each hour of the day, the direction our house faces admits only a ailing, pale stream of sunlight at best.  Sometimes we forget to open them all the way in our haste, and further cripple sunlight’s ability to grace your pasty leaves.  It is also of little help that we tend to rush from one place to the next and use the house merely as a train station of sorts, a checkpoint in our destination.  Our impatience breeds a narrow focus from stop to stop, blurring, our surroundings into a deep gray, in which you are unfortunately situated.  When you meekly raise your voice and politely request water, we reason that you can get by.  If you cry out for long-needed attention, we grudgingly shell out a couple of seconds to dump water on your parched self.  Yes, your habitat is by all means, no place for a young plant. 

Past our negligence, I recognize a blight sprouting inside of you, a belief that you aren’t worth the trouble.  In the absence of care, you have come to believe that you do not have a place among the others because you have neither vibrant flowers nor a pleasing shape.  Your merits become obscured in the overwhelming self-consciousness overtaking your physical and mental self.

Therefore you, and all plants in similar situations, must battle the wicked fate foisted upon you.  Instead of angrily casting away the present and future, acknowledging hopelessness and resigning yourself to your measly lot, I advise you to follow your stars until the very end and hang on with a tenacious grip.  The thin, mocking smiles are not figments of your imagination, but also know that they share an inverse relationship with your capacity for faith in yourself.  They place a risky wager that you will not hold together, that you will allow yourself to be consumed by their faint whisperings and seductive slandering.  Just as a sound does not exist when a tree falls alone in the forest, their words only exist if you continue to stick around and listen and only have power if you are entranced by their beguiling murmurs.  If you are able to wring yourself free from their entangling grasp, they, acting on an innate talent for destruction, will savagely tear themselves apart as they would to you had you lost their gamble.  I want you to struggle hideously against the dictates of the firmament, the fault in your stars.  I ask of trust in the very sky that wrongs you, whose incandescents twinkle with malicious mirth at your misfortune.  Immerse yourself in the gorgeous possibilities and fantasies instead of rooting yourself to an “inevitability”.  However desperate and pitiful you may seem, vie for a small chance, for the slight possibility that those fickle, capricious stars will one day shine in your favor, for that infinitesimal perhaps.

 

 

Picture taken from David Dodge’s gallery on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysoar/