The Hoya’s petals burst into a circular, baseball-shaped bloom with soft pastel blue, pink, and purple hues reminiscent of a spring day made for children, baskets in hand, their hair, and lapels adorned with white bows. In contrast, with its massive, crooked leaves and cane-like props, the prehistoric monstera evokes the resilience of the Amazon rainforest—fortitude that endures even through the destructive clashes of civilizations driven by greed and disregard for humanity. This uncharted territory is past the point of no return, where hope becomes a blackened barnacle clinging to a crumpled oyster shell, taken to market, displayed on ice as if its comforting presence could erase the nervous tic in a young girl’s eye—a small sign of a greater erosion of self, of her kin’s undoing.
She will never know the joy of a yarn-haired, tilting doll or the creak of a tire swing beneath the shadowy figure of a maple tree. Instead, she will sleep on a mattress with busted springs, drink the drips from a concrete wall, and project her dreams onto the four cold cell walls around her, visions of a world she’s never known but somehow sees. When her gravestone is nothing more than this room, they’ll tell stories of her and the doll that was never there. At the dirge, the pain of her people will be held in a cistern, its silty sludge too deep to be dredged, left to the broken.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 