Herbarium;
I was never appreciated for what I did. I had to be the one to figure out how the plants grew, the level of water and sunlight needed for the crops to survive until harvest. Half of the plants my family used–be it for food, medicine, or decoration–were plants I painstakingly experimented with growing. I was the one who spun and wove flax fibres into cloth, crushed grapes into wine, created millstones to ground wheat into flour. I was the one who figured out that certain plants yielded more, produced seeds that were hardier, and so I sorted through my harvests to find the best seeds.
What a shame. It’s all gone to waste now. I spilled my brother’s blood and it seeped into all my fields. God cursed me from the earth, said that the ground will no longer yield crops for me. It’s true–plants wither and die when I’m around. And when the plants die, the animals inevitably follow. Fortunately, it took me pitching my tent in the same place for two months for that to become an issue. So I wander. Maybe you already knew that; I’m famous for wandering.
In the first few days after I was cursed, the sky stretched out in the endless panoramic expanse around me. A lone figure in a wide shot world, I alway felt there was something hidden in the images my eye presented to me, whether it was obscured by . Everywhere I looked, he was hiding in the grasses, underneath the edge of cliffs, beneath rolling hills that blur together in image, and in memory as soon as you’ve journeyed beyond them. Now I was in a rocky landscape, far from the densely vegetated lands I forced myself away from.
I took in the scenery, then picked up a rock just like I did on that fateful day. I drove it into the face of a cliff, then scratched a line, finding the streak of white satisfactory. So I drew all the plants that I remembered, the different variations, seeds, stems, fruit–all the details that I could capture, yet it was not enough.
So I set a goal for myself. I would try to look for a flax plant. I didn’t know what I was thinking, but I wandered towards fields where I thought I might get a chance to see it again. And after months of trying, I finally found a field where they were plentiful. I looked around again, only to be greeted with the patchy trails of death I left behind. I didn’t bring a rock on which I could scratch life onto, and I had to search for one. At least the way was marked the second time.
And then I ran into another problem. I couldn’t see the details no matter how hard I squinted, and trying to see the underside of the leaves would be impossible. I could only make tiny little lines which suggested the general shape of the plant, or chaotic ravings that captured the tangled mass of plants before my eyes.
I let go. Scratched as hard as I could, slamming the rocks into each other, hitting my other hand with it repeatedly. One hit broke skin–now a red flower blooms in the scene. Was I creating life? Was I giving my own to the image before me? I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. So I threw it all down and ran. And so, I abandoned my love, absolutely certain that it was for good.
I mostly stayed in cities after that, where I could walk on beaten paths without burning my guilt into the ground. But though other people were not meant to harm me, those who recognized me invariably reacted with fear and hatred. Even though I rejoined human society, I had to live on its edges, carefully avoiding the attention of others.
A few centuries ago, I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a herbarium book. It was a wonderful find–for the first time in millennia, I could observe plants up close, as I gently ran my finger along a sprig of oak leaves, which held their perfectly preserved form. I held the book close to my chest. After sitting with it, I had to reminisce on how far humans came since the other well-travelled thinkers I met in Classical Greece attempted to explain why prey animals existed in droves over predators. But I have to be honest, I had no idea at the time either. I lived on the edge of society, hiding myself as best as I could. And I wondered about the same things, about why different peoples had different explanations for everything.
It is now the 21st century, and humanity is causing a mass extinction event. Fuck me. When I invented the founding principles of agriculture, Abel said that I had an evil soul and that I was tainted by greed. But now the people who raise animals do the exact same shit too. I don’t fucking understand. But I digress.
I’ve heard theories on impending radical changes in the earth’s climate and ecosystems. That means they may be coming under a curse just like mine, and losing their place in the world too. Perhaps I’m not so different from humanity after all, or should I say, they’re not so different from me. I haven’t had a place in this world for the last five thousand years, but maybe, like the herbarium has proved to me, nothing stays the same for eternity.