One day, I woke up with a flower growing through my heart. Yes, this is a very Gregor Zamza thing to say, but it is what happened. A single bloom on a long flexible stem, it was bobbing slightly with my breath. My first thought was, how do I get up to pee? Followed by, where is it growing from? I tried moving surreptitiously to the side of the bed and peeking over to the floor, but saw nothing. The flower didn’t react much. It followed my movements like an indifferent helium balloon. 

I tried sitting up and felt a tug. Not painful, but profoundly odd, like someone dragging a string through my heart. However, there was also give. The stem was long enough that I managed to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, feeling the tether with every step. Awful though the feeling was, I dreaded the jerk and release that I imagined would come if the flower’s stem broke or if its roots came loose. In my mind’s eye it was comparable to the cable of an elevator breaking: a violent jerk followed by the whooping sinking of free-falling. Freedom but the kind that ends in death. 

Business taken care of, I retraced my steps to the bed, walking backwards to let the stem wend back through me and not get tangled. Carefully carrying the bobbing bloom in front of me, I lay down, like they teach you in yoga, “vertebrae by vertebrae.”

There was really no need to leave the bed today anyway. Work could be done over the phone, probably even better than on the ratty old laptop at the office. I wouldn’t be hungry for a long while, having just woken up. I could just lay back and contemplate the flower. 

Probably not a rose, I thought. Overused, kitschy perfume flowers, roses. Maybe a tulip. In my prone position, I was looking at the rounded back of the bloom, where it connected to the stem. The pale pink of its inverted color bled into a paler green before merging with the slightly fuzzy, fuller green of the long, leafless stem. Veins and capillaries ran through the petals and I could almost see them throbbing with my heartbeat. I raised my palm to compare the webbing between my fingers to the fleshier parts of the petals, and found the similarity breathtaking. 

How the next hours passed, I don’t know. Certainly not in work, it must be said. My interest in the flower was growing constantly deeper. No longer preoccupied with the logistics of its appearance, I was so engrossed in the intricate structure of the petals, in the light not quite passing through the tracery of vessels like the windows of a gothic cathedral, that time in my mind became insignificant, yielding to the supremacy of geometry.

Perhaps that same day or the next, or later still, my girlfriend came to visit. By then, language had begun going the way of time. No words could do justice to the heart-to-bloom connection I was now living. I was loam, black clods of earth come together only to feed the flower, only to supply the counterbalance to its delicate airborne weaving. 

For some reason, this caused my girlfriend concern. She hovered around the bed, plaintively naming things I must be missing: coffee, food, showers, work maybe? The office had called several times, she didn’t know what to tell them. And why wasn’t I speaking? Please, please could I say something? She didn’t seem to see the flower and I couldn’t bring myself to explain. I felt for her, but in the way one feels for a character in a book. Sincere compassion, yet with no need to do anything about their predicament. 

She left eventually, I think. Perhaps around the time that I observed the flower had a daily cycle: it fluttered open when the sun hit it from the window and retreated back into itself when darkness fell. Fleetingly, I regretted seeking out an apartment without much direct sunlight in the bedroom. The flower became more beautiful when it opened, more translucent and somehow courageous. I could now distinguish at least eight different shades of pink and red in the back of its petals. It never occurred to me to get up and look at it in the mirror, find out what its face was like. The intimacy of its hidden side was fully absorbing my attention. 

Outwardly I was unmoving, possibly frightening. I was doing nothing visible. But inside me, oceans were slowly rolling their waves; glaciers were sliding boulders over great plains; mushrooms were growing massive root systems under expanses of moss; mountains were raising their snow-dusted heads. Nothing that lasted an hour or a day had meaning. 

The flower did not grow taller. It did not change at all, barring the opening and closing of its petals for the sun. However, it was becoming stronger, more real, brighter. Had my girlfriend returned now, I’m nearly sure she could see it. But she didn’t come back. I was alone with the flower. 

My limbs were becoming very heavy. When nature called, it was increasingly difficult to get up, and my walk turned into a shuffle. This was a positive change as this way, the risk of uprooting the flower was smaller. And the flower’s safety was paramount. After all, it had chosen my heart to grow through, not anyone else’s. I shuffled happily. 

Behind the kaleidoscopic movement of colors and shapes in the forefront of my mind, something was calling out weakly. But it was not speaking about the flower and nothing else could be important. I took to sitting up in bed, then crouching, arms hanging over my knees, and just breathing into the flower, watching it, always watching. It hung there agreeably, never turning my way or complaining about anything. 

Dimly, I remembered that usual flowers needed watering. I was loam, wasn’t I. Shuffling to the kitchen, stopping every few steps to make sure the stem held, I moved all the water bottles to my bedside. For some reason, I couldn’t pick them up, so I held on to the edge of the plastic wrapped around each six-pack and stooped a little to drag them, taking care not to bend over too much and crush the flower. I suppose I could have moved it out of the way, as the stem was a little flexible, but handling it was somehow out of the question. After getting the water, I made sure to drink a little at regular intervals, just enough to nourish the flower without having to visit the bathroom too often. 

The phone stopped ringing. There were no more messages or emails. The external world seemed to be forming a stalactite around the new reality of me and the flower. We were becoming immovable. This was very pleasant, like the slow certainty that envelops you when you’re falling asleep under a thick blanket on a very cold night. 

But then my girlfriend came back. She was not alone. There were others with her, strong ones; they picked me up from my crouched position in the bed. I cried out as the flower jerked around, “The stem, the stem!” They wouldn’t listen, or maybe they didn’t understand. I was dragged, the stem sliding sharply through my heart, into the living room. There was just enough length, the blossom came almost snug to my chest, and I became terrified and would yell and thrash around if it weren’t for the danger to the flower. 

They gave me something. A prick, a dreadful cold feeling under the skin, a numbness falling like a guillotine blade and separating me from the colorful world of the flower. I saw the blossom waver holographically, separating into red green blue for a moment, and struggled frantically to focus back on it. A noise was swimming around my ears, turning gradually into speech. They were talking to me, and against my will I was remembering what the words meant. They thought I was unwell. They thought they were helping me. They were hurting the flower. I bit someone. 

It took them several days to kill it. As the flower wilted, the world reverted to its old, flat coloring and nauseatingly straight perspective. I was helpless, under the influence of whatever it was they gave me, constantly supervised, I couldn’t break away. How I wanted to run, to hide, to crouch somewhere, growling and scaring everyone away from it, its beauty and indifference, its regal movement atop the stem, its blood purer than any of theirs, purer than mine, its life more valuable than mine as well. But they wouldn’t let me. 

Eventually they proclaimed me cured. The flower was gone. Small consolation, I didn’t see the blossom fall dead to the ground. By then I was unable to see it, however hard I strained my eyes. But I felt it. Not the dramatic swoop of the falling elevator, but a weak, soft cessation. I hated them. 

I went back to work. An episode, it was said. Understandable. The stress. Medication. Observation. Terms were bandied about. I wasn’t listening. Every day, I completed the bare minimum of tasks and rushed home. She was there, making me eat, forcing the pills on me, watching me endlessly, even at night. I hated her too. “We do not want you relapsing, do we?” she would coax. She didn’t understand. I wanted to relapse. Anything to get the flower back.

I am still waiting. They say when you’re healed from something like this, you start waking up with hope. There is a twisted truth in this. Every morning I wake up hopeful, scanning for a stem running through my heart. It hasn’t come back yet but I know it will.