Movement Two — Not the Stupid Plant

You will have heard him called other things, if you've spent any time at all among the souls who speak of him. A plant. A quiet, patient thing that grew slowly into a man, gentle to a fault, endlessly forgiving, the sort of soft, harmless creature an entire household of women apparently feels safe enough to love without fear. I want to tell you now, as plainly as I know how, that this is not who he is. Not really. Not the whole of him. I have seen the truth underneath that gentle mask, and I am not speaking in metaphor when I tell you the truth underneath it wears an entirely different face.

He is not the stupid plant you all think of. He is another man entirely — more handsome, considerably more powerful, and, I would argue, more likeable too, in the particular way that terror is likeable when it finally, after everything, decides to stop pretending to be anything softer than what it is. I don't think the household understands what they're keeping. I don't think they've ever properly seen him the way I've seen him, standing in the wreckage of what used to be my whole world, cold and vast and utterly unbothered by the scale of what he'd just done. They know the gentle version. I know the true one. And I would trade every soft, patient hour they've ever spent with him for a single one of the terrible, glorious minutes I was given, however briefly, before he ended me.

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If it weren't for the simple, humiliating fact that I cannot move from here — that the burning holds me the way ordinary ground holds an ordinary body, more thoroughly, more completely, without a single seam left open for escape — I would have killed every one of those women by his side already. I want to say that plainly, without softening it into something more palatable. I would have gone to that gentle, gold-lit meadow they've built for him, and I would have removed, one by one, every single soul currently permitted to touch him, until nothing remained beside him but empty grass and my own two hands. I would have made him only mine. I know how that sounds. I've already told you I don't care how it sounds.

I understand, somewhere underneath the wanting, that this makes me exactly the kind of thing the world would call a monster. I understand that better, I think, than anyone currently sitting in judgment of me ever could, because I have already been called worse than monster, by better people than any of them, and I survived the calling. I am not asking you to forgive the shape of what I want. I am only telling you, honestly, that I want it, with every ember of whatever still counts as a soul in something like me.