You’ve seen the way it can inhabit a tree. Lovestone. Vascular contortionists weaving through branches, embellishing oak. It’s beautiful, you once said. The decoration of it. The cooperation of it. The ivy wants light and promises to be good, promises to protect the tree from salt.

A covenant and wooded fingers creep. Tiny hairs from the Hedera helix burrow into the tree’s crevices and lignify. Holdfast for years. A thicket body blooms, hosts bumblebees, brilliant red admirals. The smell of nectar ribbons through her branches.

“Devotion,” you called it. Constant leaves warming the arboreal body whose shape you can no longer recall. Funny, how easy it is to forget the color of sapwood. How easy to forget the rough edges of the oak’s serrated leaves. What did the tree love? How twisted were her branches?

Decay when you peek under variegated green and white, discover woodworm. Selfish woman, the neighbors say, because he's such a nice man. Sick selfish woman in the garden with a shovel, stabbing the ground, screaming at vines.

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