SHE ignores me. I have lived with her all my life. She nurtured me, housed me, thrilled me with her beauty, but she did all this without paying any attention to me.  I tried, but I could never get her attention and fulfill my wish to be important in her eyes.

A flea should not love the dog that nurtures it. It should suck, sleep, defecate, and reproduce, taking advantage of its good fortune in having something to nurture it, give it food and shelter. It should have a narrow-minded drive for personal survival that bears no thought of its host. I, too, am a flea and do what all fleas do to survive, but I cannot ignore my host as she ignores me.

I browse my memory, trying to find a path to her. A click triggers a gully walk—tall trees, criss-crossed roots, bird calls, snails, and the inevitable garbage tossed out of sight but still there. I recoil, but she ignores it. She ignores everything I do but still manages to be my home, the place I belong.

I sit on a cloud and glide silently over the land. Her green coat is scraped away to reveal white flesh laid bare, but soon to be covered with roads and houses. Fences partition the surface, saying, “This is mine, not yours, stay away.”

Diesel fumes signal progress, as does the clatter of heavy vehicles and long lines of traffic, but if you rise in the moonlit predawn, when all is quiet, you can smell the frangipani and ylang-ylang advertising their products and hoping for shoppers, like the retailers with their offerings of wondrous products that brighten my world. I inhale, freely, giving nothing back.

The cool evening is with me now as my mind wonders. Dark clouds lit by the setting sun rush to shore, surfing the wind that tugs at me as I stand there, enthralled. Coconut trees wave their dreadlocks—like wild-haired women—in the growing dusk, while cool, casual casuarinas whisper to each other in the rising wind. I wait for the rain to strike my skin, to sting it, wet it, make it goosebump as the energy flows, and I, I enjoy her. But she ignores me.

I hear her siren song faintly, in the distance, brought by a zephyr: “I am yours, you are mine, love me to the end of time.” It fades as the breeze dies and warm, earthy smells invade. I am suddenly shocked by the thought that these scents are her next verse—part of a multi-sensual song, enticing me to sleep in her arms, calming, luring me to complacency.

But now the dawn is coming; it reveals dark clouds in the east, backlit by a distant sun. I shrug off her soft, alluring dreams, shake myself and snarl at the world. But, in my battle-ready state, I am gradually becoming conscious of a throbbing, repetitive thought—a jingle, like those on TV, but from some other source. “I don’t want to be just a flea, I would like to give something back, you see.  I need to do more than just plant a tree, and I wish to do it with company.” My euphoria rises with the sun; it’s her message. I smile to think that, although my entire life is just two hours in her time, she does not ignore me.

—Dick Stoute