I want to tell you that up until today I didn’t know frangipani was also a hibiscus. The flower strung through its eye to scent the necks of visitors to the island, temporary white and yellow flush, browning, then gone. 

 

A hypothetical flower, the frangipani lives iridescent at the edge of my mind’s side-eye, an imaginary flower that should be made of cake and almonds, is actually the cousin of the Common Hibiscus, in Korea called mugunghwa, the flower I’ve  inked on my shoulder, three of them, one for each of my children, and for fifteen years of a childhood in Daejeon and Seoul. Look how its stamen stands so proud, its heart so bright, all memory turns to carbon. Steinbeck’s Rosasharn. Pops of pink in my sister-in-law’s side yard. All my favorite flowers can be summed up by the way they can kick my legs out coming around a corner: azalea, forsythia, a cherry blossom so pink and dancing, shaking itself and my heart to bits. 

 

I could map my small years by each flowering tree. 

 

Childhood is sometimes a jailhouse only Beauty can spring us out of. And sometimes it’s a cargo we ditch over the side of the boat, then long for for the rest of our lives as we row into horizon’s aperture. 

 

I often forget that a little seed can travel thousands of miles, tossed from the scat of a bird. Wonder how it’s gotten on with it's bloom, blown past whatever scents I’ve lost somewhere along the way.

 

>>

<<