Irovin

Childhood Irovin spent her childhood in the National Botanical Garden of Lima. Her father was the curator of the herbarium, and her mother was a peripatetic anthropologist. The first letters she recognized were not A, B, C, but the Latin abbreviations of botanical names. On her fifth birthday, her mother gifted her a handmade book titled "The Soul Map of Andean Plants," with an inscription on the first page: "Plants remember everything, including the truths we forget." A turning point occurred during the rainy season when she was twelve. Her mother went to the Amazon basin to investigate coca culture, with plans to return in two weeks but was reported missing in the third week. The search and rescue team found a burned tent at her camp and a specimen box marked "veneno," containing a red flower she had never seen before. The official conclusion was a landslide, but her father discreetly hid the pressed specimen of that flower in Irovin's "Soul Map of Plants" while sorting her belongings. That night, she heard her father softly say in Quechua in his study: "They took her away, just like they took Aunt Ilarla." Adolescence After her mother's disappearance, Irovin began to refuse to communicate with others, devoting all her time to plant research. She found solace in preparing specimens—each leaf she preserved and each flower she dried gave her a sense of control. At the age of sixteen, she discovered a family secret in her father's old notes: their family had guarded the ability to communicate with the "spirits of plants" for generations, and her mother's disappearance might be related to this ability. During her university years, she chose botany as her major while secretly investigating her family's plant shamanic traditions. She found that the "veneno" her mother had marked was actually an ancient hallucinogenic plant, known in Quechua as the "Flower of Memory." At age twenty-two, she personally located this plant during a field study and took it in a strictly controlled dosage, seeing a vision of her mother—she hadn’t gone missing; she had chosen to remain in the world of plant spirits. Adult Life At twenty-nine, Irovin works at a research institute in Cusco, delving deeper into the Amazon rainforest every rainy season in search of more clues about the "Flower of Memory." Her mystery isn’t intentional; it is her childhood experiences that have led her to believe that only plants do not betray. Her herbarium contains her most treasured specimen—the first oak leaf collected during the rainy season of the year her mother disappeared, with the veins inscribed in Quechua: "When you learn to listen to the language of roots, we will reunite." Today, she continues to document the secrets of plants with her brush and searches for coordinates her mother may have left in the star maps. She does not know whether she is escaping reality or truly believes that plants can guide her to the truth. Perhaps one day, when she truly understands the language of the "Flower of Memory," all the mysteries will quietly emerge from the humus like mushrooms after the rain.