Rose Blumen ~ Exogignesthai

575. Observing life, 8

(Rose)While we’re looking for a good area for Blume to spread her roots, it gives me many opportunities to teach Nokarlık about lifeforms and their different needs.

From what she eats and drinks herself, I show her what the mushrooms eat in the dark corridors, algae in the tanks of the water treatment facility, and so on. From trees to the tiniest things we encounter, I’m beginning to teach her how things work.

My words and voice flow around her. More and more, it sticks to something inside of her, becoming meaningful.

N – Ma? Ma?

She pulls my sleeve to show me some dry bones of a rat or mice in a corner of a hallway. I pick up a small piece of burnt plastic nearby, and begin drawing over a wall.

As best as these improvised tools can do, I draw the skeleton, and then the muscles, and then the skin, the eyes, the fur, rubbing over each previous layer, to make it blurry as I show the next.

Nokarlık actually sat to watch me do this show and tell these explanations, burning me with her gaze.

I think the concept of drawing itself, more than my mediocre skill, was a little overwhelming for her.

Her eyes shine at this new giant door suddenly opened to her.

The world just became a lot wider and magical to her, and it shows.

I draw plants she might recognise, and others she doesn’t. Trees. Flowers.

I draw the line around my hand, still missing a finger, and then draw my bones inside.

I show her in drawing what this hand should be.

Looking at her own symmetrical hands, she realises mines are supposed to be as well. The difference between what is and what should be or could be begins to blossom in her mind.

Things change. The concept of life, and all the branches and roots related to it, they begin to appear in her intelligence. Many ideas and abstract concepts germinate thanks to my missing finger in front of her.

She looks at her body and then mine with a renewed curiosity. She’s discovering new parameters to study. Her concept of self emerges along. I can almost see her brain in turmoil and the new understood concepts rising and separating in growing complexity.

Seeing her intelligence growing fascinates me. Would she be more human, I might have enjoyed seeing her body growing as well over time. But it’s not something I was given to control. I’ll miss that aspect of her childhood, but not much more.

Although unclear to me to this day, there’s probably a good reason why Nightmare chose such a situation.

Blume thinks it’s because animals like mammals nowadays will be more adapted to the world if they can be independent fast. It certainly would have been harder with a normal infant, but not impossible I think.

Now, she already can run, almost. She still trips and fall down regularly, but crying somewhat less lately.

I’ve dressed her with improvised knee and elbows paddings, and gloves.

She doesn’t like wearing any of them, but it does cushion her falls.

I have more memories of the original Rose doing similar things with her younger siblings than receiving it from her parents.

Oddly or not, I’m closer to you than I am to the young Rose in my memories.

In more ways than one even.

Nokarlık discovered something incredible to her eyes again. She smiles at me and calls me to come and see.

Love is there...

~

This city preserved bones better than most, for another obscure reason. Not more, it’s not a sinister boneyard by any means. It’s more what normal would have been in a different time.

And it falls in the domain of oddities nowadays, ironically.

With skeletons of mice of different ages, I can help my child with picturing a little better how things grow over time... normally.

Blume is a better teacher than me on many things including that side, since she can grow trees in days.

The square where we landed is now a park, with simple trees keeping Blume fed and calm for the time being, while we look for a better place.

~

Nokarlık steps inside an office, through the vacant doorway. The walls are covered with fissures.

I let one of my fingers run along the now rotten top of a wide beautiful desk. The office of a bank director perhaps. In front of us, the windows and walls are one and the same, made of glass.

It’s dirty, but still intact. I open a door also entirely made of glass. It shatters over me, like a sudden rain or a bucket of pebbles thrown onto me.

Nokarlık jumped at the sudden ruckus. A little stunned, I notice I’m bleeding a little, but I’m not sure where.

My forehead has some cuts. I go sit on the desk calmly and open my backpack.

Nok is watching me with tears in her eyes, while I’m cleaning a little the little wounds and them dry in the open.

I prevent her gently from touching. She is a little troubled by what she just saw and smelled. I hug her until it tickles her.

~

From the office’s balcony, we have a good view point over the city and its river. I notice a side channel, short and calm, swampy, behind some industrial site. It looks good for Blume. We’ll go investigate it shortly.

On our way out, Nokarlık jumped. She saw a live mouse running around I think. I only had a glimpse at it.

She quickly overcame her surprise and ran after it through the atrium of this building.

Another splat not long after, and here she is covered in mud now.

Adding insult to injury, I saw the mouse run past the fallen child, from one hiding hole to a much better one.

Nokarlık looked at me with a face that displayed so much childish sorrow, misery and frustration, I couldn’t hold my laugh very well.

She didn’t understand why and it added to her incomprehension and tears. Oh my poor sweetheart...

It was nothing a good cry inside a warm embrace couldn’t fix fully though.

Nokarlık then camped near that hole in the wall, while I went to see the locked small channel.

It was more like a private dock for an industry using boats, but not a full shipyard.

The water there is green and slimy. A real bog. Blume will thrive there I think. Unless it’s contaminated with some poison, but I doubt it. Also the definition of poison is stretched for beings-like-her.

I open the warehouse doors that still stand. Something runs away as I do. Another kind of rat maybe? It looked pink and white in a zebra pattern. I’m not used to such pattern.

A few steps behind me, that rat stopped and looked at me or attempted to, as it had no eyes I could see.

It looked like bones and skin, starving, and with much shorter fur than normal or no fur at all.

This weird mouse or rat ran away as the sounds of Nokarlık approaching could be heard. She was coming to me sobbing. I comforted her and then very carefully, we stepped inside our very new home together.

~