To the cattails in the puddle in the middle of the city: I love you. I love your brittle reeds, as dry and fragile as the malnourished girl in her 30's admitted before me and who will be here — cardiology appointments and all — long after I am gone. Cattails, you bloom and bluster thick, wild, free as the person who transferred to the DBT group and finally grew beyond their setbacks after months too afraid to leave their friends in the process group. Your reflections are realistically gorgeous, identical to your self-image, and I am wildly jealous like you would not believe. The pond water is not to blame, and I think you cattails do not fear being hungry like the new admit last week because unlike them you eat when you need to and do not fear growing beyond recognition, but that's the trick, isn't it? Every day we wake up someone just a little more distant from the person we once knew but it's okay, it's okay because we do it by degrees and with this disorder all we know is the now and the horrible future that feels like it could spring itself onto us at any moment's twist, fumble, stumble because we've worked ourselves thin and tight as iron wires ready to snap and break, cable wires stretched too far too long holding up the Golden Gate bridge where cattails do not grow beneath because it is too salty but you wouldn't know that would you, cattails, because this pond is all you ever knew. Or do you remember before, like so many of us cannot, when you were just a seedpuff floating on the wind like a fluff of cotton or a puppy or a kitten, or maybe a squab like I see the parents of drinking from your pond? You are so serene, and this construction site is something I am so anxious of you for because the moment I met you I knew that one day you and all the bushes and mosses and reeds would be uprooted, trampled, overrun by boots and excavators and steamrollers for some space of parking lot in a city where people are too poor to afford parking after scraping together their rent every month. Cattails, the moment I met you I was afraid of the day you would die, but you don't even worry, do you? Each day the sun rises and the world blooms anew and you rise to greet the day's pigeons, exhaust fumes, smatterings of sunshine with vigor, readiness. Not naive hope, nor reckless abandon, nor the limited energy you could scrounge up from whatever dregs you left yourself with from brief respite on the weekends, but a sense of acceptance, of rolling with the punches — or maybe I'm projecting. Maybe you are just cattails, strong and free and soon to be destroyed. But here nevertheless, and beautiful and fleeting. Maybe you’re like you. Maybe you’re like me. Maybe we’re all different things and that’s okay but I want to imagine that I am more than myself because aren’t we all? We all know we came from stardust and will eventually become as stardust again and that’s so mundane now, that brilliant and awesome poetic knowledge, but let’s make it real again. Just you and me, cattails through the chainlink fence covered by construction tarps illustrating a high-rise apartment. A gym on the second floor and birch trees all around, it shows. A pool on the roof. Only a life’s savings to get in, only an eternity’s living difference before that can be me. But I’m with you, cattails. And you’re with me, and one day you’ll be part of this apartment, maybe. But for now you are in bloom and maybe there are other puddles throughout the city that will have you in the future. They say that water cattails are in is the cleanest because cattail rhizomes clean the water, and to never eat the rhizome without knowing the water quality over time because the rhizome contains all of the toxins filtered from the water. I see ducks in the construction site pond with you, cattails, and your reeds and sticks and bushes like a concrete forest pond and I sit and watch and the world fades until I am once again a part of time in this universe as it will be, as it has been, and as it is now. I am forever and so are you, and we will meet again if not now then in another life.
I must continue my walk home, but I hope to see you again tomorrow.
Oops, left this one in my docs folder.