Recently I was thinking about flowers, and how some orchids have prominent petals that actually match the insects who pollinate them. These “landing pad” petals are arranged on the bottom of the flower so that the pollinator, a bee maybe, will land there and nowhere else. He’ll rub his nubbly back against the inside of the orchid’s column, and carry its pollen out into the world.
What if people were like that? Not so much with the mating, but with the signal that comes before it. It’s more than good hair and hard muscles—it’s something that lasts longer and represents a relationship that works. I thought about couples who grow old together, whose personalities match so perfectly: a true, natural love, like insects and the flowers who support them. What would your petal look like for your partner?
Feeling misty about love in the world, I started reading an article online about a type of orchid that looks like, as well as smells like, a female wasp—thus tricking numerous male wasps into acts of fruitless reproduction. These flowers are so much like the real thing that the males will waste their sperm on them (which, ew, the flowers don’t have a particular use for), leaving less available to the real lady wasps! Why would the orchids do this?
So much for true, natural love. These flowers are as self-destructive as reality show contestants.
It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.
William Carlos Williams
homewreckers! i instantly thought of the bitchy flowers that look down on alice (in wonderland)