It’s a tired truism, pain bringing forth beauty. But ooh, look: the sparkly crystalline drip. (Sweat? Blood? Tears?) You don’t water the plant, slake its thirst. It just stays suffocated in its lipstick wax until boom, blooms of utter succulence push up from the core (and then die), push up from the core (and then die). The children brought it at Christmas.

I mooned over the thing—its riotousness. The pain part, though? No longer do I put stock in that torture-for-the-sake-of-torturing thing preachers still preach about. I’ll take less beauty. The idea that God, or god, needed placating so somebody had to get nailed to the beams? So the world could be saved? No. Just, those honchos had hammers.