Nape Orchid

There is a plant shop in the Albaicín that I have been walking past since I was a student. It occupies the ground floor of an old house on a narrow street, and whoever runs it sets the overflow out onto the pavement in the morning — terracotta pots, trailing things, the occasional orchid on a low wall in the shade. I have touched that orchid more times than I can count. Not to take anything, just to feel the bloom — it is always slightly cool and the lip of the flower has a texture that is hard to describe, like paper that has gotten wet and then dried again. I don’t know why I kept doing it. When my mother died two years ago I walked that street every day for a month, and every day I touched the orchid. I wasn’t thinking about her particularly. I wasn’t thinking about anything. It was just somewhere my hand knew to go. I found Jess through a friend in Madrid and I told her I wanted something at the nape — the place I cannot see, the place other people see before I do. I told her about the orchid on the wall and she asked what I was doing when I touched it. I said I didn’t know. She said: that’s exactly right, let’s draw it. What she made is so small I sometimes forget it is there. Then someone will touch the back of my neck — a friend, a hairdresser — and pause, and I remember.

Elena — Granada, Spain