T
he tulips are tapping against his legs as he weaves through the rows of them. There’s a pattern to them, he knows — the path curves gently as he follows it, intercepts with others like lines drawn through a painting. The pieces of it are there in the flowers roots: disjointed images pressed into his skin with the laughter of their petals, a riddle he is not sure even they know. Still, he is looking for the answer to it as he wanders past them.
But it is not the secrets waiting to be plucked like tulips from the fields, nor is it the breeze that pushes gently now at his back (like it is pushing him deeper into the petals, deeper into the field, deeper into the festival). And it is not the colors he sees blooming in shades of red, and purple, and gold when he lifts his head over them like he is a scythe arcing towards their stems, and they a vessel holding back a flood he wants to release.
He tries. Oh, he tries to remember what it feels like to look only at a field of flowers, only at the flowers, and appreciate them for what they are, rather than what they could have been, or might be, or were before.
Ipomoea follows the soft purr of music and magic woven between the stalks, and tries to not think of all the ways he is different now than the last time he had come here. He does not know how to look away from all the bits of his memories that sit in his soul like petals torn from the tulips and scattered about in the depths of him. He does not know how to see the shadows of them dancing between the stalks the way he used to.
He cannot stop wondering who he might have been — what he might have been — had he stayed here. Had he stayed in Denocte. Had he stayed in Solterra.
Had he caught that ship leaving the Night court’s docks when he was only a yearling and sailed to worlds far from this one.
All he has to clutch now to his chest are a thousand what if’s, what if’s, what if’s, all of them keeping him away at night like a sonnet he can’t help but repeat. But all thoughts of those other worlds, those other Ipomoea’s living other lives, disappears when he turns his head and watches a child racing through the tulips. And he does not say anything when he goes to her — he only smiles at her when she turns and begins to run back towards him.
“Maeve,” he breathes her name into her mane, nuzzling at her poll affectionately. “Are you here with your mother?”
an endless garden
