Somebody online called osmanthus a stupid plant. Stupid in the literal sense. Lured by false warmth, a hint of spring, it pushes out buds right before the snap. This year, in the see-saw weather, it keeps falling for the whiplash—blooming, peaking, withering, then blooming again.
There’s one outside my dorm in a concrete pot. The groundskeeper tied a red ribbon around its trunk for good luck. By March, the ribbon is sun-bleached pink.
The tree opens overnight. I stand next to it, dizzy with sweetness, and type, Yeah. I’m free.
Two days later, the sky dulls, dims, and blanches away. The blossoms go brown around the edges. You don’t reply.
In April, it warms again. The tree tries once more.
By June, the ribbon has frayed to threads. The osmanthus is a mess: half-opened buds bruised gold, cut and laid open by the changing season. I Google, “how many times can a tree bloom before it dies?”
One to thousands of times, the AI Overview answers.
Kierkegaard calls despair “the sickness unto death.” The tree keeps coming down with it.
One humid night, my phone pushes a cold-wave alert. I glance at the locked window, the dark silhouette of the planter on the quad.
I don’t go check on the tree. I lie there, sick with its golden scent, stupid enough to believe we might just make it to morning.
Andy Qifeng Zeng is a writer from Beijing. He holds a BA in philosophy from Harvard and is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Columbia. Find him on Instagram @imandyzeng.