Flowers in a Shit Field
By Abbey Leroux
Wearing a white cotton skirt embroidered with flowers and a pinky gauzy blouse, I feel like a dumb little flower growing in a shit field.
Blonde hair flowing, freckle-faced and dressed up, my pretty appearance completely betrays my feeling that there is constantly a war happening – in my history, in our history, into the present and the future – and that a thick rope connects me to it, tied up to a pivotal point in my chest. The rope jerks me back, inward. Makes my heart nauseous. There is a dark whirlpool of Vietnam muck where the rope winds through; a wormhole, spinning deep deep in my chest like an eternally flushing toilet.
Careless, walking steadily down the Manhattan sidewalk with no land mines blowing my feet out from under me. No distant battle rumbling the ground, at least not literally. Ready to break down and sob and kiss the filthy cement. Ready to call my dad and tell him I was a soldier too.
But I look like a flower. I fit in this garden. But my heart… it’s in the shit field.
The thing is when I see a flower growing in an unlikely place – through a crack in the sidewalk, all alone in a expanse of mud, on the surface of a pond or lake – so innocently holding its little existence in its delicate stem and petals I feel nothing other than a naturey bliss. The growing regardless, honestly, perfectly, unabashedly, guiltlessly, godfully… it’s too much. My heart reverberates with its color and the soft skin of its petals. I identify right to the core with the unconcerned tenacity of one little flower seed doing its thing despite everything else that is going on or has ever gone on. And in conjunction with all of these things, it grows. It yawns open in the morning, lives for the sunlight, and basks in a rain shower. It kills me.
Yet when I feel like that beautiful flower walking down the street in a summery outfit and snagging glances from admirers, today the toilet keeps flushing, tugging on that rope. When I get home, I immediately re-dress in black shorts and a black shirt. I wear my tattered camouflaged Converse. I tie my hair back. The flower is ready for combat. It’s true. A heavy, booted foot slams carelessly down on a flower in a field and it winds its way back up, slowly. It demonstrates its sentience. I admire that flower more than anything, and dear lord I know the world needs them. But when I look like one and feel like a citizen who doesn’t know war but knows war consequences, who humps around the guilt of safety, the flower I look like must have its lovely little petals plucked off. Or its roots blown out from under it by a grenade. Or at least to run away and find a fucking Disney movie to sing in.
In a way, I know I really am that innocent and pure. Well at least I must seem that way. And if I seem that way, if everything I’ve experienced in our agreed upon reality supports that, then maybe that’s the way it is. Maybe I am exactly what I am perceived as. Maybe I am only that for as long as I’m being perceived.
I don’t know how my dad did it, and I may never know. How did he end up not only alive, but still with a heart and a conscience? Send me to war and I can’t help but think I’d never come back, not to any home or semblance of sanity. I will end up with a necklace of human tongues around my neck, charcoal covering my face, sleepless nights on ambush. Extreme vigilance. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” he introduces myself to myself. Abbey, this is Mary Anne. It’s amazing how much she is the exact you you don’t know. The one I desperately want to know, but am terrified of going through what I’d have to go through to find her. There is the similar yearning to know the deeper darker side of my self, and the terror. The staring off into the mountains, the distance, the willingness to learn, to be good at primal things like clipping off gushing arteries and singing to a jaguar’s disembodied head in a stinky incense-and-death laden room in the jungle.
But I don’t suppose I really want that. Maybe it will be set aside for another life, or maybe being as close as I am to my father’s experience is all the experience I need. As long as there is mud there will also be flowers.