The air is charged, the beings making up the forest biome thrumming to a beat I can’t quite understand.

Woven within the wild expanse of greenery is a timeless relic, a bewildering being enshrouded in over a century of magic and mystery.

After all, the vine is still wrapped around the outside of her home, rows of large sheets of arresting leaves embracing the columns of her front porch, both spilling inside and trailing out to the waiting world beyond her doorstep.

You can’t escape the cultural associations embodied by plants. You can’t have one without the other.

I have an emotional attachment to it all. The earth. The sky. I’ve studied it all my life. And it hurts me whenever somebody hurts this, out here. My home.

Have you ever seen the veins in your arm or the way your lungs look when you breathe? The capillaries, all the little tubes—they look like the branches of a tree. You can see the parallels, the sameness that you see in the human form.

We’re all connected. We’re all stardust. We’re all energy. At our core, we are all the same.

Just one tendril, leaping toward the dawn of a better horizon, at a time.

I am a patchwork American, strung together by DNA strands from distant places. Meant to exist in the margins. These are my labels, my unshakeable question marks. Belonging to no one, with nowhere to belong. I am still struggling to understand where I fall, where I fit. Am I invasive?

Like kudzu, we have been stamped as something to shun. Like kudzu, we have thrived in areas we are unwanted, despite resistance to our existence. Like kudzu, we have persisted.

Kudzu is no more a harbinger of devastation, a damning curse that befell the land, than I am.