Short
by Jessica J Lee
Tortula muralis. Does that feel too formal to you? Wall screw-moss, then. I’ve seen you every day that I’ve lived in this flat, your green cushion gently hooked onto the garden’s brick wall. I could have so easily pulled you away whole, brought you inside. Instead, I brushed my hands against your tender body. Tapped my fingers along the sporophytes you extend into the air above you. And I have thought only of your softness.
What did you grow on before the bricks and mortar in your name? What could I have called you then? Rock moss, chalk moss perhaps. I know only that you are not like other mosses I have loved—those growing softly in the shade of pines. You grow alone in city air, catching exhaust fumes in your leaves.
I do not even know the boundaries of you. Are you many, or one? If a part of you broke off today, I know you could continue, and that part could start anew, doubling yourself into this world. Identical. I know this is one of your longings; you have held spore capsules aloft in every season. Puffing invisibly, you are being blown on wind currents that carry you elsewhere across London.
This morning I left the house while the sun was still low on the horizon, white in a winter sky. Everything was covered in a thin layer of frost: leaves crystallised, the pavement slick and glimmering. But you, warm in the boundary layer, you were glistening with dewdrops. They hung from red spore capsules, acrobatic and still. Light glinted from tiny pools between your leaves. I reached out to touch you then, but pulled back. It seemed too light, too impossible that you might be the only warm thing on this frozen morning. I wanted to leave your water intact.
I suppose I am simply saying how much you have meant to me. This steady presence in my day, in a year when nothing has felt steady. I do not know how long I’ll stay in this flat; you cannot know how long you will cling to this wall. It is not entirely up to either of us. But so long as we are here, I want to greet you. I want to tell you that I have noticed you. And that touching you each day has brought me into my skin, into tactile and momentary pleasure. My hands against the brick and your small body. I linger, soft leaf on fingertip.
