When I was eight, I met a boy at soccer camp who first told me about pineapple flowers. Pineapple flowers are a small, stubby weed that have a little mustard yellow flower in the center. They smell sweet and fragrant, like an ambiguous mix of fruit and perhaps just a touch of honey. He told me: “Whatever smell you think about is what the pineapple flower will smell like! Strawberry! Blueberry! Mango!” He liked to announce his smell of choice before he inhaled, I learned, as if naming the scent was what worked the mysterious pineapple magic.
The pineapple flower did, truly, have the ability to take on new smells when willed. Just thinking could muster up some fragrance, but it was with your declaration of faith that the scent really sprung to life. After the gradual, inevitable loss of interest in ball-kicking, I would often find myself wandering the outskirts of the field collecting pineapple flowers. I screeched fruit names maniacally—going from flower to flower—before discarding them, hell-bent on testing just how far these magical scents could reach. What about bacon? Or even chicken pot pie? I often found myself forgetting that there was a world that lived on outside this grassy, fragrant microcosm.
The pineapple flower was my grand introduction to trickery and manipulation, but it was also the vessel that carried my first glimpse at human frailty. How fragile are we that just a simple willing mind can bend and break the physical reality right before our eyes? In these subtle expansions of our world, I found an entirely new way to live. In a world I redefined, green trees became pink, fishes became aliens, and flowers became beings with beating hearts; simply because I willed it so. The physical no longer defined what was real and what was a fabrication, I learned that what comes before the physical, before the reality, is our own minds.
When I walk on trails, I often talk to myself, painting fantastical images of the nature around me; vines reaching higher into the sky than the eye can see, and each leaf on a tree housing an entire village of Irish bards. I’m sure Ilook a bit ridiculous, and while this has never happened, I sometimes imagine what I would say should a passerby question my monologue. I would probably say: “Y’know, if you yell loud enough, you can make anything come true,” then I might start screaming fruit names and smelling leaves like a madman again.
In between the shifts that you never truly wind down from, the vicious cycle of heartache, then heartbreak, then doing it all over again, and the constant reminder that the gears must be moving, we can often forget that we always have the power to choose. It is in these moments of unbearable monotony that I remember that no, the gears don’t have to be perfect, and that maybe, instead of perfection, I could pop loose a screw or two and find a different view of the familiar. So please, find a weed and will it to make it smell of peaches, climb a tree and imagine each branch as a limb, each trunk as a spine, and perhaps just once a month, sit on your front doorstep and notice how this world, that you think you know, is in fact completely alien and you are but a Martian.▲
