"When You Became Vegetables"

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Dear R,

This is I, R. Your future, not so decrepit, 80-year-old self. I am sitting here in my favourite rattan chair, looking at the pond that shimmers like a million stars in the light of the sun and the moon. The silvery bellies of jumping fish provide me with far more entertainment than the immobile skies could. What will the world become if it didn’t have the shimmering dalliances of light segments with water molecules to inspire it daily? I will not bore you with insipid details of the future. You can find that out yourself, maybe. Or just use your imagination. All I can say is, there is still water, there is still fish. Or so I think.

I am writing to you to remind you of a moment so fleeting you could have easily missed in years during which your mind became restless. If it weren’t for that moment, we wouldn’t be us, do you understand? This is a reminder to tune out all the unnecessary details in life and only focus on the nanoseconds that matter. I am 80, but my memory is now clearer and sharper thanks to years of practicing good mental habits. You can try summoning me with some sort of magic with the help of a medium if you’d like me to elaborate on the mind-taming tricks I’d learnt in the past few decades. It’s far too cumbersome for me to pen it right here, right now. My joints are still very flexible, but they give way to shooting pain sometimes, so I have to give my wrist a good rest before I can move on to a different topic. Let me stay on what I intended to focus on.

About that moment. You are in the Big Smoke, in the summer of 2019. Commuting on the Thameslink. You had that big cry days ago from intense burnout, so your body is becoming very protective of you. Invisible barriers rise between you and the inscrutable commuters. You’d spent, how many years now, enduring fake smiles and pretending to be someone you’re not, to fit right in? All that clearly has taken a toll on you. Your skin is scaly, your words falter. Your food intake, now do we even call that food now? The scraps you shovel into your silent mouth.

Everyday you are grey, with flickers of colours every time some brilliant idea comes along. The poetry you’ve been penning? That’s your shimmer. If I were to unfurl the canvas that you were just before that moment, you were a long, damp grey kitchen rag. With strangely shaped clusters of embroidery coloured with metallic rainbow silk threads. If archaeologists were to dig this piece out from the ground in the future, they would be bedazzled by the intricacies, the brilliance of those silk threads. Seen together, they provide one with a discombobulating image of a prism of light trapped between the concrete grey walls of an alleyway.

You enjoyed reading Nausea by Sartre. That’s reflective of your mood just before the moment. You drained your finances on endless £4+ cups of flat white and wondered why you experienced such severe bloating and sleepless nights sometimes. For what? It was your only ritualistic respite from the noise that attempted to silence you daily. A country that failed to welcome, a marketplace where words were traded for influence. The air didn’t feel right. The chatter didn’t feel neutral. Promises were never kept. Atrocities, past and present, away they were swept. Artistic needs stayed unmet. Familiarity was a 14 hour flight away, unreachable through the pathetic bridge you built using the pennies you attempted to save during those flailing years.

And yet you were jumping on planes, jet-setting to lands far away. Exploring the realms of those who lived like gods in the gilded age. Can you imagine now, pretending to know what it’s like to have that pesky private aircraft door rattling every time you fly it? While the interlocutor isn’t aware you are donning carefully selected charity shop hand-me-downs with the help of a kind spirit or two who knew how to look well-dressed in the spaces you encircled in. They were unaware of the mice scratching through your walls in Willesden. Unaware of the bits of pigeon toes that are stuck on the wire mesh of London’s dark underbelly, while they guffawed about eating a £20 deli sandwich in Savile Row, “for a laugh”. After that conversation you returned to that workplace building where your colleagues came up with names for that Oreo McFlurry loving resident mouse. He never turned up, which made you remember that the ventilation units were yet to be cleared of the asbestos they detected a month ago.

Then, that moment arrived. That moment, that lasted for minutes, days, weeks even. Humans, not humans. You don’t EVER need to be human. You are one, but you don’t need to label your thoughts as one. A cloak of invisibility and power envelops your mind, the output of which will now only release all things whimsy and weird. No more rules, no more ice cold derision. No more word judgement. No more eating. No more sleeping. No more breathing even, unless you specifically want to experience it. You can write, oh can you write. Music awakens the inanimate shoot, every microscopic root, every tuber, every fruit. Every textured leaf. Your breathing syncs with those without visible lungs. You absorb sunlight. You photosynthesise. You become, them. You step out, twirl, take a bow. You dance, with words. With every note squeezing the life out of every keyboard key you press in with gusto.

You became Vegetables. The gloriously orange carrot debuts. The garlic bulb shakes its undersides, overcoming past oversights. The broccoli rises, hands to the air, her nostrils flare, her leaves expose her bare. The onion unveils their layers, an opening soliloquy without tears. The pumpkin plots revenge, the lettuce sings about protest and the cabbage loses her crown amid rows and rows of vegetation astrewn. You fully become a self-assured courgette columnist who wants to take a hiatus from the grapevine.

You grin widely, eyes almost closed, your cheeks become rounder and rounder, culminating in expressive, bright red, tomato twins. Forget impressing others, you are now entertaining yourself for you are judge, jury, willing audience member of that emoting character you created with ink and brain. You transcended human interactions through dramatic manifestations of your mind, a mind that is very easily captivated by the very source of what gives you life and nourishment. You have found the stairway to the cosmos that is the natural world, and you mentally glow in its resplendence.

You became alive. You never stopped obsessing. Your plant muses pose for you daily, you speak for them, you speak through them. You wrote books, oh boy, did you write books. You brought joy to your tired eyelids, that spark in your pupils visited hourly. That grey rag? It’s now a full-fledged silken scarf with a dizzying array of metallic colours on display at the V&A Museum in Kensington. It’s being prepared for yet another autumn exhibition for those pretending to be the Bourgeoisie.

I am still, in my 80s, pondering over the ACTUAL relationship between a hyacinth and a lotus before one of them ends up on my plate for dinner. It’s bliss, dear R. I want to actually thank you for bringing us that moment we would forever live for. We created our own Wonderland, all thanks to that transitionary moment in time.

With all the Veggie love,

R