Prompt: For years you’ve talked to your plants as a form of therapy. One day, one of your plants begins to talk back to you sharing its assessment of you.
“It’s just I don’t know what to do anymore,” I said, pacing around the room, “really I don’t. If it’s not one thing, it’s another—”
“You’re inability to make decisions has lead you to this point, and refusing to make a choice will continuously lead you to here.” I heard a wispy voice say from somewhere in my room. I spun around, searching for the voice. “Not with just this decision,” the voice continued, “but all others that will inevitably come in the future.”
“Hello? Who’s there?” I asked, looking from the bed to the closet to the dresser. “Who said that?”
“I have spoken.”
It came from the dresser, near the potted succulent sitting atop.
“Who?” I said.
“I.”
It was definitely near the plant. I opened a drawer and ruffled through my underwear. Nothing.
“Who is I?”
“I am I.”
I opened the next dresser drawer and found nothing there either.
“Can’t you stop messing with me and just tell me who’s talking?” I spat, straightening, glaring towards the succulent.
“I am speaking.” The succulent’s bright green leaves shook with each word. “I am I.”
I took a step back, the wind pushed suddenly from my lungs. “You— what?” I took a deep breath, exhaled. “You can talk?”
“A lot of species can and do,” it said, leaves jingling together.
I ran my hand through my hair, glanced around the room, looked back at the plant. “But… How? Why?”
“I have always been able to speak, but I have chosen not to until this moment. Why? Why is because you have spent many years speaking about your issues and problems with life and I have absorbed them like the water in my soil. You are about to embark on a new chapter in your life, Gary, and I believe that you will need to hear my advice.”
“Oh?” I said, “and what advice can a plant give?”
“My advice is the same is what I said before. You are indecisive and continuously find yourself in predicaments that you are not confident or knowledgeable of to understand. You make rash decisions due to this, and nearly a hundred percent of the time, they are the incorrect ones. You are anxious and depressed, more so the former than the latter. You are young but not young enough for it to be an excuse. You will move out from this place and have your own house, and that frightens you but you believe you will be fine because the other people of your race have done it and continue to do it without much issue. But the fear is still there and—”
I unclenched my hands and snatched the plant from my dresser. I stomped over to the trash bin and chucked it in.
“Throwing me away Gary will not solve the problems that you have, especially the ones of intimacy you have been currently having with Megan—”
I wrenched the trash bag from the bin and tied it tight, then threw open the window. The cold wind was sharp on my warm skin. I could still hear the plant through the plastic. “And, you still continue to make rash decis—”
That’s all I heard it say before I threw it outside and slammed the window shut.
If I had wanted a therapist, I would’ve went and seen one.
Read my previous prompt, “Persecution of the Abnormalities.”
Purchase my work on Amazon.
Micah Castle 