As I looked at the flower I noticed it falter. I couldn’t tell if I had imagined it, if it had happened, or if it was a glitch in the system of both it and I were a part. It was a momentary breakdown, a kind of portal through which to access the false synchronicity I had been presented with.

The flower grew and grew. And as it grew it became a new thing (like the old analogy of never stepping in the same river twice, or the ship of rotting wood repaired and repaired until it was made entirely of new parts). I kept watching, trying to catch it out in the moment that its new self stepped in.

I think it happened twice,

or maybe three times. >

Trying not to blink I realised that it moved both forwards and backwards, or maybe they’re the same thing. It was an arrow on a string, being waved around in the hands of a child. So those few moments of substitution were actually closer to a form of mitosis, where she divided herself in two, or three, and those new parts in turn cradled the past of their new self. The flower engaged in a silent murmuring. She spoke to herself in sounds she didn’t understand, but hoped her preceding fate might be able to decode. The flower worked hard, producing the destinies of the people who visited her. After sunlight offered her a chance at hoarding glucose, she passed her petals over to non-existent hands to receive. Unlike the flower, the plastic petals kept their form.

They obstructed time’s request for movement, instead gathering to create a dense blockage. If the fates determine the destiny of those who tend to them, the threads of fate are lost within the chaos of felt. Without the slightest hesitation the flower fell into her own trick, becoming disorientated within the world she-herself had created. She could no longer remember what would happen to her tomorrow.

The flower began to rotate, hoping to find the answers to the questions she hadn’t asked in the process of circumambulation. After I began to feel dizzy, it occurred to me that maybe the flower was standing still, her feet planted in the solid ground, and it was me who was turning. Or perhaps stillness is a fallacy we’re happy to accept, until we’re pulled into air so thick that movement becomes impossible and vision becomes blurred.

> Someone once told me that the secrets of the Universe are hidden in triangulation.

Someone once told me that the secrets of the Universe are hidden in triangulation was written to accompany the work Immortal Flower, by Laura Carthew, Melbourne, 2016.

* Image courtesy Laura Carthew

Links:

• Laura Carthew