I V Y

Poison. 

She's poison; the way she lures you in and holds your gaze. Your eyes on her. 

Her. A stem rooted in the coffee brown earth. Her leaves green with veins like rivers, blue-green, with tiny sharp edges, hardly noticeable. Then there's those damned petals. They feel like skin, soft, fragile. Arranged perfectly, each one. A faded color dusted on top. Toxic.

But your eyes rest on the beauty you hold, the skin you touch. You don't notice the thorns; already piercing your skin. Deep. To the bone. Captive. 

You like the way she dances as the wind moves through her. You like the way she looks different in the moonlight. Your eyes, always on her magic, never on the blood running down your fingers. 

The poison. It slips into the thorn pierced capillaries that oxygenate the nerves on your fingertips. The very thing that makes you human. It runs through your bloodstream, more like a hormone, less like a virus. It stains everything in its path with high intensity ecstasy. Numbing all other senses and feelings and nerves. 

You are paralyzed. You don't know it yet. You haven't moved, you haven't wanted to. All you want to do is sit there, holding her. Mesmerized by all that she is. 

And she forgets too, for just a second, of the murderer she is. She gazes into your eyes like the sky. Like the clearest sky she's ever seen. Like the perfect day. Like when she was a child without petals, without thorns, just a stem emerging from her mother earth. Just learning how to grow. 

But she starts to whither. She feels your blood coating her body. She realizes she's been plucked. No longer with her roots, no longer with the very thing that made her what she is. She is broken. 

She sees your sunken eyes; a blue sky now surrounded with gray clouds. You keep smiling at her, unaware of your motionless body, of the dried blood that has glued her thorns to your skin. 

She begs you to let her go. She tries to make you see that you've been poisoned and that she is the source. But you refuse to look or to believe. How could something so beautiful, so soft, so perfectly arranged, be so toxic? 

So, she rips her body from your hands. Open wounds now where thorns once were buried. Bleeding again. Painful now. You still refuse to look at your red painted hands even though you feel the pain now, the pain of her ripping herself away from you. 

You try to pick her up again. But the nerves in your hands are now useless. You tell your hands to move, but they don't. And so, you cannot hold her again. 

And you think it is all your fault. That's the poison smeared along every crevice formed by your brain. It tells you that you should have held on tighter, you should have given her water, you should have told her more, you should have told her less. That you were not strong enough to hold a creature like her. All lies, every one of them. 

Look down at your hands, take your eyes off of her, even for one second. Then maybe you'd wake up, you'd react, you'd realize you were dying. 

But you can't. The poison has wrapped itself around both muscles and nerves that command your eyes to move. You can only look at her. You fell the pain, but cannot see the source. 

She gets picked up by the wind to be reborn elsewhere. She has left you helpless. She has left you to die. 

But what if the antidote is the very thing that moved you to pick her up? What if she was screaming it the whole time, but you were listening to the lies in your head instead? Love yourself, love yourself, love yourself. What if that chemical once released was able to reverse the damage the poison had caused? Would you be able to obtain it? Would you be able to set aside your pain? Would you be able to fight for your life? 

They call it "survival of the fittest", the weapon. The sharp things that grew out from her body, the chemical they created. The things that she did not choose to have. The things that were destined to come to pass when she was only one cell starting to divide, engraved in her ancient DNA; before the world saw her emerge from her mother earth. 

And every time she is reborn, she obtains the same body. Sometimes the color on her petals is a different shade, but always the same. Born a murderer. Born knowing that one day there will be another who will pluck her to make her theirs, and who will die because of it. 

Because there are few who obtain the antidote. There are few who are strong enough to love themselves more than they love the poison.

Just as there are few, rare even, who are immune to her poison. And so she lives a prisoner to herself; to surviving at any cost. To living through the inevitable painful death of all those who romanticize their love for her.