I closed my eyes and tried to see life like you did.
We saw an old couple resting on a bench, their bodies sighing into each other, and you cried for tenderness. We saw a group of city children rooting in the mud, their faces lit with primal wonder, and you cried for innocence. You saw a row of ducklings trailing behind their mother in a sickly pond ringed with algae and you cried for motherhood.
LOVE AND PHILODENDRON BY PATRICK SEAMAN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 83
We lay on a white-knit blanket. The air was muggy and thick with mosquitoes. I was sick and I couldn’t smell, so you described the smells to me. You said the pine trees smelled like a green sword thrust into a frozen river, the sweet basil like a nymph’s sap-dipped palms cupped around a nose, and the roses like sacrifice.
I closed my eyes and tried to see life like you did, scents like silk ribbons and sounds like pale crescent moons, and sandy toes.
We saw an old couple resting on a bench, their bodies sighing into each other, and you cried for tenderness. We saw a group of city children rooting in the mud, their faces lit with primal wonder, and you cried for innocence. You saw a row of ducklings trailing behind their mother in a sickly pond ringed with algae and you cried for motherhood.
In the shade of a sobbing willow you held my hand and told me that there was nowhere on earth better than in this garden to be in love. I had not known I loved you before that moment and I never doubted it after.
Beside the garden’s exit, a plant with capillaric vines clung to the wall. It was a lifetime ago but I can see it now like it’s right in front of me. A plaque named it a climbing philodendron. Its leaves were green chlorophyll teardrops cascading down the red brick. It had covered the wall like a choking ivy. Its will to thrive was enthralling. A few tendrils climbed past the wall, pushing towards the street, the river, the sky.
You asked me to let you climb on my shoulders so you could cut those aspirational leaves free. I was nervous we would get caught (do you remember how fearful I was then?) but you told me it would be okay in that way you always did and I was swept along in the way I always was.
I hoisted you up and with the toothed side of your house key you sawed off the tendrils and hid them in the pocket of your jacket. We rushed out of the garden giggling like children.
You planted the cuttings in a clay pot at your apartment that night. By the time we moved in together to that little place in Carroll Gardens with the iron fire escape and the lion door knocker, the philodendron was flourishing. Its deep green leaves were like dull, flat spears. You hung the planter in a woven straw basket outside the bedroom window and the philodendron grew with us. Its tendrils reached the ground floor and spread across the building’s facade like a benevolent rash.
You loved your mother’s philodendron and it loved you back. You were always so fierce in the way you cared for things, with solar intensity. The plant responded to it, the same way it did to your mother, and grew to match your voracity.
Do you remember? When you first learned to crawl you would strike out on your own and your mother and I panicked, looking for you under the chairs and behind the window drapes. We found you tangled in the vines that by then stretched through every room of our little home. The tendrils swaddled you like a wicker cradle, holding you close and safe. When we pried you out, the philodendron seemed to hold on like it was reluctant to let your sweet self go.
You had been a light sleeper as a baby but after that day we let you sleep with the philodendron next to you and you never woke up crying again.