IPOMOEA
let's be wildflowers
H
e can feel the trees whispering overhead, the way a bird might feel an updraft pressing on her wings. They rub their leaves against one another in a feeling of excited anticipation, like the forest is plotting something great or terrible. He tilts his head, to listen, to focus, but all he sees is that golden sunlight and it fills his ears like the roaring of the wind. Perhaps if he had tried harder to listen, he might have noticed the way her horn catches the light like the edge of a knife as it carves a bloody path through the air. Maybe he would have seen the sapling shiver beneath the weight of her stare. But he doesn’t - Ipomoea only sees the way her horn seems gilded in gold, like the sunlight has folded itself around her like a cloak. He only sees the white coursing down her neck like a river when her mane is lifted, momentarily, by her movement or the wind he isn’t sure.
No one has ever asked him before to interpret the trees. No one has ever cared about how a morning glory might feel when the sun and heat begin to rise, or what a young redwood might think when it stands so small before a grove of towering ancients. He doesn’t think many know that the grass watches them when they walk past, or that the trees stand as immortals that keep scores.
He presses his shoulder into the tree, and the branches overhead seem to shiver, and a curtain of dry leaves rain down amongst them.
The consciousness presses against his like the gates that once held a river at bay are now being opened. He feels it slowly at first, almost subtly; but then the weight of all that water presses in against him, and for a moment he thinks he might be drowning in it all. In the desert he had only felt cacti and fig trees and other small shrubs, who he realizes only now are like ants in comparison to the wealth and immortality of a tree that has lasted centuries. He can feel the trees roots like they are his own, intertwined with the roots of all the trees surrounding it, mingling until the grove they stand within seems more like one single living thing rather than dozens.
He closes his eyes, just long enough to settle himself, to remind himself that he is a horse and not a tree.
He feels the wind on bark and the way his entire body swings gently from side to side. He sees himself and Thana the way the trees see them, as pressure standing overtop their roots and a breeze that moves past them. And he remembers how similarly they feel to other horses who have walked these leafy halls, and how insignificant it seems when all he needs is the sun and the rain, and when he’ll outlast them all anyway.
There’s a knowledge of life there, and also a fear of the death amongst them, and he thinks it’s just the memory of the fires in their roots (it’s not).
"They say we look like two others that once came here," he says, when he opens his eyes and blinks. "Although it’s been decades since they last saw them. They say we sound the same." The trees don’t tell him what happened to the two, although a rush of emotions leaves him feeling suddenly disembodied.
"Half the time what they say seems meaningless," he says, softly. And he wonders if she, too, thinks it all seems meaningless, when to him it feels like the most important thing in the world.
When she gives him her name and he pulls away from the tree, he isn’t sure if it’s the forest that trembles at the sound or himself. Because he’s looking again at the white that splits her neck in two, and he thinks for a second that he could at it forever and still find something new in it.
And his name, when he says it, sounds more like what he is than who he is. "I’m Ipomoea."
@Thana | "speaks" | notes: <3
