I Was Not Told the Apocalypse Would be so Horny

Its been two weeks since the fires. I’m in a state of overwhelm and freeze after returning to the city where the evacuation line was blocks from my door and several of my friends have lost their homes. My friend Evelyn has come over to help me clear the yard. We’re sweeping and hosing the ash off my patio in makeshift hazmat suits of trash bags, pink latex BDSM gloves and Home Depot particle masks.

Evelyn is one of those people with an encyclopedic knowledge of plants. You can point to any plant: in a shop, the neighborhood, or a book and she’ll know the latin name for it and what species it belongs to, its sun and soil preferences. I can’t even keep a Pothos alive. I once even killed a snake plant.

My neighbors have built a 2-story ADU in their backyard, which unfortunately has ruined my view of the Verdugo mountains, but I’ve resolved to not be a NIMBY about it. LA is in a housing crisis, after all, and the solution is more housing. Instead, while I have her here, I’ve enlisted Evelyn to help me design a barrier between the new build’s second story window and my kitchen so the new tenants won’t see me making coffee in the nude. We have decided on a lattice, white and wood (an homage to the house's white picket fence) at the base of which we will plant climbing plants. I want to plant Lilac at first, nostalgic for early summers in New England. Evelyn talks me out of it, but knowing I love stinky flowers and want to encourage more hummingbirds and butterflies in the yard, she suggests a few different kinds of jasmine.

I ask about Bougainvillea, the Cookie Monster Pajama Pants girl of Southern California backyards. Ubiquitous, dramatic and aggressive, taking over yards at a rapid rate; but loved for their hot pink paper-like flowers. The one in my neighbor's yard gets hacked back twice a year like a poodle with a bad hair cut, only to be blocking their parking spot again a few months later. I assume, as a plant nerd, Evelyn will react as if I have asked someone who works in music how they feel about Coldplay. She does, her side eye barely restrained under her mask, if only out of love for me. She explains like she is telling a 4 year old where babies come from, that, as someone who can barely be trusted to water a cactus, let alone prune something before it comes through the kitchen window, Bougainvillea are not for me. She also tells me that they only explode in their pink flowers when stressed, a sort of ‘violins on the Titanic’ attempt at propagation before they perish. A laugh gets stuck in my throat as the sexologist in me reaches for the horticulturalist at my side: “Oh my god! We’re just like plants!”

As someone who recently turned 40, I pay distinct attention to my menstrual cycle, awaiting the coming irregularities of perimenopause. Because of this I know I am not yet in my ovulation window, which has me wondering why I find myself sighing heavily in my office, or making totally unnecessary small talk with the soft butch behind me at the library. Why I put on the button up shirt with a button missing over the apex of my breasts and decided to wear it anyway. But Evelyn’s insight has me thinking: perhaps I’m sprouting my own flowers.

My friends have expressed the same– a quiet desperation toward sexual connection simmering under the surface. I fantasize about sneaking a kiss with a friend who has a girlfriend, smelling my colleague’s hair who has just lost their home as they cry in my arms. Is it a desire for connection, reproduction, aliveness? I think some combination of the three. I have noticed for myself there are different forms of, ahem, amorousness: periods where I want to be taken roughly, periods where I want to feel skin on skin with someone I cherish. Usually the former happens right before my period, my ‘monthly day of heterosexuality’ as I have taken to calling it. The latter is more likely to coincide with ovulation and its peak in estrogen, my desires leaning toward high intimacy and high emotional rapport. Work remains work, and in the same way I would be able to foam milk and punch a clock despite my desires, I find I am able to show up for my clients though it never satiates my own needs because it is work, performance, labor, service– not authentic intimacy or reciprocation.

It was this way in early covid too: skin hunger, and frankly, horniness, had us climbing the walls as we faced another day of pacing our studio apartments. In the same way the bougainvillea explodes in flowers, parted and arching for any bee in the vicinity; I put on my shortest skirt and offer longer-than-usual hugs to my friends. We’re all creatures of survival, blooming desperately in the worst of times– over-eager shrub and human woman alike.