The green baby

I looked at the objects on top of my dresser this morning.

I looked at the photographs and the porcelain bowl and the gilded jewelry box. I looked at the coral red stone egg, trying once more to recall where I had found it, or who had given it to me. And then I saw, next to the egg, my pale green seed, a bean-shaped thing that I had first mistaken for a stone when I found it in the sand.

It is the only organic thing on my display. It looks like a very big, milky, pistachio-colored kidney bean.

I was walking at the beach on a dark, cloudy day when purple-black clouds seemed to fill the entire sky behind the sea. I was looking at this sky so full of swirls, a sky that took up three quarters of my field of vision, a sky that seemed about to swallow the rest of everything. And then, I looked down at my feet. Amongst the seaweed and the broken pink shells, hidden in the coarse dark sand, I saw this smooth green shape. I really thought it was a strange rock, but my friends told me it was a seed.

I kept the seed, it was so beautiful. I forgot it was a seed, and it became part of my collection of objects in my room, my things that I carry with me everywhere I go. But today it changed itself. I caught it. I peered at it for longer than usual. A bright green shoot had come out of its side. A very tiny bulbous outburst. It almost looks like the birth of a cactus. It is no more than a centimeter long, and it´s divided into two little knuckles.

Somehow it has managed to be alive, lost amongst my hard, inanimate things. I did not nurture it, I did not give it anything to live. It must have absorbed moisture from the air. It must have drunk from the microscopic water particles in the wind, the draft that penetrates through the slats of my closed blinds. So here is a magnificent outcome of my having no windows. The weather has turned lately, it has been raining torrentially, and all that wet air has found its way into my apartment, and has created a minuscule finger of life in my bedroom.

It occured to me that I could plant the green bean, that I could provide an appropriate environment for it to grow. But I have no idea what its normal habitat is. I am afraid of killing it. I found it in the sand, a hard and dry shape. I transported it to my bedroom and nestled it among dead wood and stone and fabric. And now it´s growing out of air. I may just leave it be, and see what happens. My green baby.