Movement Fourteen — The Narrator, on What Flora Gave Back

I told you already that Flora's answer was the truest thing said in the whole of this account, and I want to return to it once more before I close, because I don't think one pass was enough to do it justice.

If the future already changed once, maybe it can change again.

Consider what that sentence actually requires of the person saying it. Flora does not have Iris's sight. She cannot see the past, the present, and the future arranged before her all at once, the way our nameless evil supposedly can, the way Iris herself very nearly can, in whatever partial, filtered way her own vast attention allows her to look forward without unraveling everything she's holding still. Flora has only ever had the plain, unglamorous evidence of her own life — a plant that did not expect to become a person, and did.

That is, I think, the entire architecture of her wisdom, if wisdom is even the right word for something this unstudied, this unearned in the ordinary academic sense. She has already lived through one impossible change. She was once rooted, wordless, waiting on a hillside for a sun that had already left her behind, and now she stands in a castle of crystal, loved by more people than she has ever bothered to count, capable of growing warmth out of nothing simply because she wants to. If that much could change — if a plant could become someone capable of loving and being loved this completely — then why, in her own plain logic, could a doomed future not also become something else, given enough time, given enough hands willing to keep working at it?

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I don't think Iris fully believed her, not that night, not completely. I think some part of what Iris carries has hardened past the point where hope arrives easily, the way hope still arrives easily for Flora, without much resistance, because Flora has not yet lived long enough to be disappointed by it in any lasting way. But I think Iris wanted to believe her. I think that wanting, however small, however quickly buried back under the weight of everything else she carries, is worth noting here, in this account, as its own small, quiet victory.