The first time I heard about lampenflora, we were walking through Aillwee Cave in County Clare—and it was growing, quiet and sure, beneath a fluorescent wall-lamp. It’s not supposed to be there, the guide explained. But it grows wherever it can. It’s a simple equation: artificial light plus sufficient moisture. The result is a German word that so closely resembles its English equivalent, lamp flora, that to call it a cognate would be an understatement. 

–

They also call it la maladie verte—green sickness. My own sicknesses, lately, have been rather pink. Sore throats that last a little too long, the flu on New Year’s Eve, strep on a trip to Nevada. You could even say the pink in my cheeks is a sickness, of sorts. It never quite goes away, no matter how many doses of Doxycycline you put it through, no matter how many botched laser treatments (one) burn off two layers of my skin. I’d rather like a maladie verte, for a change: one that rubs the cave paintings off the walls of my throat, and saps my skin dry. 

They call lampenflora a disease because it’s not supposed to be there. It’s not there originally, naturally. We didn’t mean to put it there. But we did: if not for our fluorescent lights, our cave tours, and moisture droplets on rough stone walls, it couldn’t exist. We unmake our past by carving out our future. So it goes.

–

The night I returned from Aillwee, I lay with beads of unearned sweat on my temples. I was raking my hand through some soil in a flower bed outside of what seemed to be my house, unearthing dozens and dozens of letters from a boy named K—–, whom I no longer speak to. All sealed in envelopes: all with postage. All copies of the same letter, from months ago. 

It was an inane love letter, as I could’ve predicted. In it, bizarrely, he talked about algae. As if he’d known about the caves, and the fluorescent light, and the man-made conditions of life that defy their maker. 

A moment later I realized I’d been reading a page ripped out of a biology textbook, and I shoved it back into the envelope with a pleasantly sickened feeling. I pulled the stamps off the letters—they had yet to be postmarked, somehow—and pressed them on a roll for later use. 

–

A man named Jack discovered these caves eighty years ago, while on a walk with his dog. For decades he kept it a secret. In those days, the cave-dark lay far too thick to hold any life, besides the man and his dog. He should have died with the secret, maybe, but he didn’t. 

Jack’s dog led him into the caves—and so Jack led all of Ireland, after a spell. 

Now, the lampenflora clings there. The lightest layer of barely-there green I’d ever seen, soft against wet rock. I wanted to cry. Life is utterly relentless.