Lightly the fine brush traces, faintly the supple hairs draw. The upturned leaves, sketched in a freehand style, coil like wisps of smoke about the stems. Yellow heads peak behind pillowy masses of petals. The flowers bear no roots, shade, or water, and yet they look out from their canvas, sitting, walking, leaning like queens in emerald dresses.
I was four years old when I began drawing flowers onto my body. They began as miniature paintings, the faint bloom of a lily, a long vine of wisteria, but soon propagated all over my skin. I disliked my art teachers and loathed my sewing-obsessed aunties, and I had very little patience for designing. Yet, without ever wanting to grow bored, I spent hours mindlessly twisting, patching, and stitching my skin into a tapestry of the outside world.
Flowers on your skin, flickering here and there, here and there. Not all, but enough to know you exist.
Once, I saw a cute boy at recess and stumbled over to play Floor is Lava with him. He sat beneath the monkey bars, looking like a reindeer as the November breeze blushed his nose and his fluffy jacket puffed his torso into a fur carpet. Rain plinked against cool metal beams.
“Do you wanna play,” I said softly, and the boy turned and smiled up at me.
“Sure.”
Time passed lazily. Alert against the lunch bell, we chased each other up the slides and careened between worn pillars. He was the monster. Then I was the monster. Then, neither of us remembered who was who and ran brazenly until our lungs filled with rain and our jackets deflated from their sodden weights. At last, he smiled down into my bright, happy eyes and spoke.
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
The next morning, I walked into class with a constellation of flower pins speckled in my inky hair.
After all those years of mimicking I thought I knew what a flower was.
In early Spring, when the moon rose, it meant watering time had begun. The nights were cold and quiet. I slipped from the warm cradle of my blankets, padded across the lifting floorboards, and slipped into spring’s frosted sweetness. Twilight made lamps out of the gold-veined lilies. The protected hearts of wild roses bloomed against the dark. Tiny aphids chirped against the slight breeze. The night was ecstatic, thin, mine.
“You need to hold still,” the nurse said, her eyes sleepless and full of impatience. Long, blood-soaked wires sat in a tangle upon her gloved hand. She tugged each stitch prudently until it popped from the skin, and a soft moan escaped my lips. My skin crawled with weeds, invasive aliens scraping between tendons. Rip! Rip! Rip!
The brown earth uttered soft groans, a chorus of a million tearing tissues, as I pulled each weed from the soil. I snipped herbs and the blossoms of wildflowers and dug up roots and plucked off wayward twigs from the hydrangea vines. I laid fallen petals down to rest on beds of root tangles. A new pile of graves, crashing waves of cemeteries, pooled at my feet.
All this belonged to me: the seeds, the first shoots that tore from the soil, the rotted bulb. I scattered these children. I held these delicate vines. I poured white light into these vacant fields.
The garden swallowed my skin, my mind. I had no other release.
The first time I came out it felt like dying, like something gouged from my body and laid wriggling on the dining room table. It was a false ending to something precious I had starved in the dark corner of my closet for so long. Only two truth-words escaped my lips. The first felt like the dew of rain on grass, the hum of your mother singing in the early morning, warm blankets fresh from the dryer. The second felt like the blazing of a million wasps, elbows jutting out of my skin, fingers digging between soft bones. Distorted.
I searched for a way out between pages, between the percussive thumps of a soccer ball, between notes and scales and concertos, but I only found a semblance of warmth in the garden. On my knees, pulling clumps of clover from flower beds, tugging sick trees from the ground, twisting blackberries from fence spines, I hold hands with myself beneath the earth.
Sometimes, when I have stood listening to the garden shift and creek at dawn, when it is 5 degrees below freezing—and not even the boldest of dandelions will erupt from the ground— I find myself thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant. Eternal gardens that luxuriate in love and beauty. But, over there, death seeps through the cracks, piercing the pristine portrait as Spring wanes and Fall rages. Shelley wrote the long poem following the death of his child. I wonder, did he also feel shadows writhe beneath his skin? Wandering across the supposed splendor of this world, waiting for someone, something?
The second time I came out it felt like reading, like falling into a new world. I bought a $150 Philodendron Mican plant afterward. Of course, I hadn’t meant to. Bored and restless at my brother’s regatta in downtown Seattle, I clamored about the cigarette-carved streets and found myself plummeting into the awaiting jaws of a plant store. A dark, brooding object in the corner of the room caught my eye. The plant was shaggy, tangled, an utter mess of twisted vines and crinkled leaves. It was perfect. Of course, its tousled appearance also masked the tiny price tag on the base, but it was too late to turn back. I ended up naming the plant Nell, named after the similarly ragged and brooding character of the same name in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and wake up to her terrifying sprawl every morning.
I watched the blossoms shatter from the cherry tree, no longer pink, but old, old, a yellowish white. How easy they shed their skins, to change from image to image so easily.
Dad gardens differently, in the dirt, abstracted, painted with long brown pants and thick gloves. This is how he gardens: five minutes of intense weeding, ten minutes of contemplative walking. White noise pounds from his headphones. Sometimes, I work beside him, doing the seeding chores, pruning, thinning the hydrangeas; sometimes, I watch from the porch and listen, wondering if he noticed the new daisies I planted.
Gardens were not meant to last forever in the real world. One precious flower dies here almost every day, leaving you behind.
It’s nearly fall. The few flowers left, rotted, summer-ridden, want only to die back, pack up, go home, leave the earth a leveled grave. Corpses lay lifeless in appearance, twiggy leafless vines, dazed. They leave the wintering world naked, cold, uncertain and searching for warmth, anywhere.
The daylilies, rosemary, hydrangeas, salal, morning glories, sunflowers, rhododendrons, belladonnas, daisies, yarrow, asters, camas, lilies, hostas, wisteria, foxgloves, hemlocks, lavender, and peonies watch from their graves—shadows painted on skin—as I mutilate the earth again and again and again. ❖
About the Author: Born in Washington, Addison Affleck is a poet, writer, and a “Romantic at heart.” She grew up sandwiched between forests and the ocean in the rainy city of Seattle and has since lived in Northern Washington. Deeply engaged with ethnobotany, she loves sharing and discovering new stories at her local community garden. Her published poetry and prose have found homes in The Raven Review, Sparks of Calliope, AQUILLA Magazine, BreakBread Magazine, Reedsy, and more.
