It is so quiet, finally quiet. So quiet and no one is here. The air is in its fullness. Maybe someone skates by in the width of the street but it’s so quiet. Music escapes the mouth, tender and afraid. It’s a bit of alone--unfurling our own fear of silence--that moves without agenda or need. 

My hands reach and grasp in the darkness finding the tiny lantana flowers--gathered in communion. Their scent another savior, it’s own kind of sound. We are in secret: a place invisible and midnight, but for the plants, the passionflower, and the glow of light upon this book. 

I am walking slow and intentionally drunk--patient with the feeling that is also a secret, is also in quiet, is never graceful or controlled. Gathering what’s been witnessed in the daytime as untouched and unrecognized but for its color. What we can imagine as purple. As deep red. As pink or pomegranate. As separate orange and yellow, not quite in the way the sun sets. 

What if pain is not a part of our dreams? Then what do our dreams look like? Our freedom is not an emancipation from pain--but what? 

When I’m walking along the side of the road--up against a building or by a fence that was meant to keep the dogs in and the other people out--I am arrested. 

The band of tension my fingers brush past. The sweet and soft curl of the cucumber tendril meeting me.

A long bean tendril takes the trees and fence wire and small branches into its tight embrace. Never desperate. Its insurgent path made through feeling the air in / out of a need to ground. Relying on another. 

Sometimes one wonders--

What is a tendril?

Threads of delicate and intricate curl pattern, shiny red highlights that peep through a dark brown zig-zag. Raven-black even. An even bolder maroon. The black roots showing, holding deep to their fertile imagination as they move down, forward, and out. 

At the nape of the neck, uneven, perhaps uncontrolled. Bouncing ‘bout the kitchen. Heated on cast iron. Catching particle, wind, and petal in its curves. 

A threadlike, leafless organ of climbing plants, often growing in spiral form which attaches itself to or twines round some other body, so as to support the plant. 

--is this a parasitic relationship? Might this unknown and emergent vine suffocate the infant pecan, a tiny melon plant? 

An angel and I walk through wide expanse of park, and along a canal by the bridge. Crawling upon these sloped fences that hold down rocks is a vine full of tenderness and resilience. Making itself stronger when it has less to hold onto. We wonder if this vine is all one family, one parent, all one mother. Emanating from this unknown central hub. All of its babies, all of its kin, growing where there’s space. Creating space for themselves among the others. We trace the vine’s journey ‘long the family of pecans. 

In a place of infinite families, we climb the matriarch of pecans and sit in her body. 

I wonder if these tendrils can catch or collect the way that light moves?

Morning light, perhaps. Perhaps reflecting the pink-grey tendrils moving into a grey-indigo nighttime. Perhaps, holding onto that last bit of sunset. 

I think this vine breathing out these tendrils--which hold onto something to create its own sense of stability, literally writing of itself the thick connection it feels in the air--I think it might take down this infant pecan. 

Yesterday the sun set on all of us, kissing our skin deep and golden. Eating jollof rice and drinking ginger beer. Simple laughter in spite of grief, the sound escapes even in fear and unknowing. 

These tendrils express all the sensuality I hope to one day access. An easy explanation of my infatuation in its boldness. The casual nature of its need--fulfilled. All I want is touch the way it touches. 

It eludes intimate interactions with just one other. Choosing itself and its kin over the singular potential of the seed we just planted. Tendrils seek out mutual abundance, community, interdependence--like joining with the tall grass that refuses to be mowed. 

Or 

Covering, crossing, weaving, themself on/into/about these steel chain-link fences. Parading over the relics of industry and late-stage capitalism. It gives itself strength and space to grow here. It is not intimidated but emboldened in its love for itself. 

Itself which is not singular but its own kin. Which will soon move so far across the surfaces and girths of other bodies that itself is seemingly untraceable. Where its origins cannot be found, charted, or eradicated. 

I want to touch the way that it feels. 

Note the passionflower (or maypop vine) in particular: it gives itself years to flow along a fence. How it makes me believe that the movement of vines and tendrils are the only reason that fences should exist. The only reason buildings should be tall is for the tendrils to feed and make way for themselves. Its expression, a cartography, a map of desire and freedom. 

But we don’t take over in this way, don’t seek the corner office on the hundredth floor but for the plans of its destruction. 

Every time I write about nature, I am also reminded of that fear of anthropomorphizing. How close we come to subjugation in our writing, even of that which we are related. How often we think of property in our bodies, fingers, and voices; even in the moves toward its demise. 

Yet, I am enraptured in these moments of midnight, breathing deep and screaming into the open and empty spaces so often occupied by propertied people, by the people that own but never behold the night like this: undressed in her wideness and vastness and blackness. 

This is a black gaze. The tendrils love the sound of our voices. They cheer when we gossip and join in our laughter as we sip afternoon coffee and mist them with water. Flutter when we notice them. They love our touch too, but are not interested in our direction. They are invested in the wild possibilities of self-determination. 

Ona (they/them) is an artist, dreamer, and earthworker living in so-called Austin. They are invested in Black feminist ecological work and thinking.