There is a plant growing in my belly.

I swallowed a seed many years ago, and since then there has been the plant. The plant, occasionally, leaves me with remarkable thirst, with aching pains, with twisting vines through my limbs. If I care for it, if I allow, the plant thrives. I tip my head back and open my mouth to the sun. I drink cool water, I eat only what I think a plant could appreciate. Like attracts like, does it not? And I have a plant growing in my belly.

When the plant is doing well, and I am taking care of myself, I can feel it bloom. It has bloomed notably, with gusto, on several miraculous occasions. It bloomed in high school when I kissed a boy (who’s father hated me) under the bleachers during homecoming, just beneath his father’s feet. It bloomed triumphantly when I finished college, for an entire week, where I waited after the end of exams for graduation; driving places with Layla Alsnany as she stuck her crossed feet from the passenger seat window, red nail polish on her toes, and back in our apartment teaching me how to make chips, and laying out at the reservoir to get a sunburn together.  And the plant bloomed all the way from my belly to the tips of my shoulders when I took Kate Carter to the diner and we sat there in the middle of the day, skipping out on work, to plan our futures together.

There is a plant growing in my belly but now I think it is dying.

I am struggling to remember the last time that it bloomed. I have been doing everything I can, standing outside with my mouth open for many, painstaking hours, but it does not seem to get enough sun. It has been four years since I felt a flutter of it opening its petals. Its vines are distended. 

It seems to be only roused by surprise, so that when I try to instigate it the plant only shrivels. It needs to be taken, breathless, in mania. Passion is chased. If you just say, ‘here plant, here’s some water for you’ it huffs and turns away like a high schooler.

There is a plant growing in my belly and I can’t seem to make it happy. I look at other people and I think, well, of course.  They are smiling. They don’t have a pernicious plant to maintain. They can enjoy things. They can make a spontaneous decision, they don’t need to spend additional hours in sun gazing. They don’t have to feed themselves surprises and hope that the surprises please some insatiable, morose horticultural anomaly. 

They never have to look at the world around them and measure it in daylight, in nighttime, in fertilizer, in water. In circadian rhythms and early rising insomnia. They’re free. But I have a plant in my belly.

And I think that it is dying.

I don’t know what will happen if it does die.

I have been fostering this plant, tailoring myself to its whims, for such a very long time. I don’t know what its absence would be like. Would it be worse? Would I have the grooves of retracted vines inside of my limbs and veins like a network of ant tunnels, abandoned to crumble to dust? Or would something else be allowed to fill the space?

Something else can sound appealing, particularly on days when the plant burns up from too much sun or flops over from too much water.  But if I don’t know what is going to replace it, how do I know if that is better or worse?

I’ve lost petals before. A friend of mine had died very suddenly of a random, horrible medical condition that struck without warning. One moment we were discussing Voltron and the next she was dead on the ground, and I was abandoned with the terrible choice of whether or not to tell her family that Voltron had killed her.

I’ve lost other petals. Other disappointments or heartbreaks, the leaving of Kate Carter—but I don’t know what it would be like to be rid of the whole plant.

Frankly, I don’t know how our symbiosis works. I’m afraid to think, to potentiate the plant’s departure, because what if it is aware that I hate it and that is why it refuses to improve? So, intelligently, I have to mask these thoughts–so as to better trick the plant that is growing in my belly.

There are trees that are more than four thousand years old.

How long do I have to wait for a simple plant to die?

My son called me from school yesterday.

He informed me that Kate Carter had forgotten to pick him up and so I drove to and shuttled him toward Kate Carter’s house. 

In the car he had been silent. He had shambled to me, and gotten in, and looked out of the window.  It was sunny, the sky was blue, but he acting as if there was a rain cloud specifically meant for him. Surely this was not so grave as my abandonment by Kate Carter. And I had told him, your mother probably is running late at work and forgot about your practice. No need to be so dreary about it, more than likely just a misunderstanding. 

He’s old enough now, he could drive himself if he wanted, there’s no reason at all to be so muted.

But he didn’t seem enlightened or inspired by my words. He stared out of the window and didn’t acknowledge me at all.

So we drove in silence for a few long, drawing minutes. 

I found a new thing to say, rather than allow the silence to persist. I asked how his practice was. Some…sport…ball. He said track. I said ah. Nothing was improved.

I asked my son, how has school been? He said fine. He stared out of the window at passing scenery. At neatly manicured lawns and traffic stops and storefronts. He said nothing.

I asked him if he was seeing anyone, he grunted.

I asked him if he was hungry, he grunted.

I asked him if he was a pig, he rolled his eyes.

Finally, weary of my interrogation, my son told me: just leave it.

My son has a plant growing in his belly.

I must be careful in how I phrase this, because I don’t want it to suspect, but I have decided that you-know-who likely is going to die soon. In fact, I am going to help it along. Gently, of course. If for no other reason, so I can know what is on the other side, and tell him.