6.5 — A Flower Opens Her Eyes

She felt it too — low and sudden, an answering want stirring beneath the ache, answering what she'd started, and it was there, in that exact instant, curled against me with the gauze slipping loose around her shoulders, that the rest of the world fell away, and she was somewhere else entirely.

I don't remember the moment I began. I don't think there was a moment, not the way the word suggests — a single point, a line crossed, a before and an after with a clean seam between them. There was only, at some point too gradual to name, awareness, arriving the way light arrives at the bottom of still water: slow, filtered, without sharp edges.

I was a flower. I understood that much, eventually, though understanding is too strong a word for what I actually possessed — a flower does not understand itself the way a person understands a fact. It simply is the fact, entirely, without any distance between the knowing and the being. I was small, and pale, and grew low against the dark, rich floor of a forest whose name I never had, because names belong to creatures with mouths, and mouths were not yet mine.

Around me, other things grew and did not grow. Taller shapes rose far above me, dark and patient, their crowns lost somewhere beyond what little light reached down to where I was rooted. I did not envy them their height. I did not yet have the shape of a thought called envy — I did not yet have thoughts at all, not in any way that someone with language would recognize as thinking. I simply grew where I grew, low and small and rooted, and turned, in the slow, wordless way roots and stems turn in darkness, toward whatever thin filtering of light found its way down to me each day, following it as it moved across the forest floor like a creature following the only music it had ever known.

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There was a rhythm to it, before I had any word for rhythm. Light came, and light went. Warmth came, and warmth went. I did not count these arrivals and departures — counting requires a mind built to hold numbers, and mine, then, held nothing but the plain, immediate fact of light or its absence, warmth or its absence, moisture or its absence. I simply turned, and waited, and turned again, in a loop that had no beginning I could locate and, as far as anything in me then could imagine, no end either. The loop was the whole of existence. The loop was all that mattered. The loop was, in the most literal sense, everything.

I did not know, in any way a person would recognize as knowing, that I was alive. I did not know I was small, or patient, or alone. I only turned toward the light when it came, and settled into stillness when it left, over and over and over, in a rhythm as old and as unremarkable to me as breathing is to a body that has never once had to think about breathing in order to do it. The rhythm was simply what was. It was the whole world. It was me.