Ivy

In Palermo, a hibiscus stood on the verge of blooming, overgrown by a single strand of ivy. The bud fought to open; the ivy squeezed it shut. I recognized myself in it so completely that I took a photo right then. It was a business trip — I had to leave the next day — so I left without ever knowing whether the flower won the fight or lost it. I was in that exact same state. That's where Ivy came from: not from an answer, but from the not-knowing.

Each lover turns out to be a mirror. He worships a woman with frozen feet and calls her heaven. He lets himself be pulled under like a marionette and calls it love. In the title track he names the knot directly — “I'm not yet in bloom” — and everything after is the slow loosening, the bloom finally happening in the dark, too late for her but not for him.

Water runs through all of it: he drowns in one song and is baptized in the next, and everyone ends as “raindrops, carried back into an endless ocean.” It grieves a “rose that never grew — no thorns, no leaves,” and swears its smoldering will “glow in all the ages of this world.” Ivy knows the loves that mark us most are the ones that never even got to live.

Then, at the summit — after the ice, after “it was myself I encountered” — the grip releases. Love “blooms in oblivion.” The shackles turn out to be “the things we think we know.” What strangled the flower the whole way through was never the world. It was the holding on.

A breakup record that becomes a spiritual one without ever announcing the turn. The flower was always going to bloom — it just had to learn to let go of itself first.