By Maria Buczak

Tw: Mental health struggles

Begin with the apple.

Not the shining red caricature of fruit on a classroom desk, but the one half-buried in the garden, cratered with slug mouths and soft with time. There is a logic to rot. A rhythm, even. The apple doesn’t scream when it goes. It sinks. It accepts. It takes on the texture of memory: bruised, softened, collapsing inward until it is only shape and suggestion.

I envy that.

I used to think growth was linear. Seed to bloom, child to woman, ache to catharsis. But somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t growing. I was fermenting. Quietly. Densely. Things began to smell sweet and wrong inside my head. I couldn’t think without feeling like I was unraveling under some invisible mildew. I started mapping my decline. I needed to understand. I needed logic.

So I began to study rot.

At first, academically. Moulds. Mildews. The romance of mycology. I wrote a paper on fungal networks that read like a love letter to decomposition. My biology teacher circled a paragraph about hyphae with a red pen and wrote, “poetic but unclear.” I wanted to scream. Clarity was never the point. I wanted someone to read it and feel the soft fur of ruin under their fingernails.

It spread from there.

I kept cheese in my desk drawer. I pressed banana peels between pages of textbooks. I whispered apologies to them as they browned. Everything was an experiment. A kind of ritual. I began to believe that understanding rot might let me name the thing inside me that kept spoiling.

Because that was the crux of it. The truth that kept blooming under my skin like black mold under wallpaper:

I was not healing. I was souring.

No one warns you that survival can ferment. That grief, shame, isolation, they don’t always pass through you like a storm. Sometimes they settle. Colonize. Take root in the damp places you ignore.

People said I was withdrawn. Moody. “Teenage blues,” someone offered once, and I wanted to laugh until my teeth cracked. Because they didn’t know. They didn’t smell it. The low, sweet-sick scent of my thoughts in decay.

I started to keep a journal, but not of words. Of textures. Smells. The way rot feels when it begins in the pit of you. I wrote about mornings that tasted like rust. About sleep like a bruise that wouldn’t fade. I named the small deaths: skipped meals, canceled plans, messages I read but couldn’t answer.

There is a logic to it.

Decomposition is a system. Predictable, even. First, the freshness fades. Then autolysis: the body digests itself. I learned that in biology, too. Enzymes rupture the cell walls. The boundaries dissolve. Then the bacteria come. Then the bloat. Then the purge.

I began to see it in my own life.

Freshness: gone. I don’t remember the last time I felt new. Clean. Untouched.

Autolysis: a perfect word for self-sabotage. I watched myself ruin things before anyone else could. I pre-ghosted friends. I threw away projects I loved. My insides unraveling with surgical precision.

Bacteria: intrusive thoughts, multiplying. Old fears I thought I’d buried, surfacing with swollen, eyeless faces. I saw them in the mirror sometimes. I stopped looking in mirrors.

Bloat: that pressure in my chest, like I was full of gas and sorrow. Like I might burst. I wrote “I feel like a balloon made of meat” in the corner of my notebook and underlined it three times.

Purge: the weeping. The hollowing. Nights that ended in sweat and bile and trembling.

The pattern comforted me. If there was a sequence, maybe there was a conclusion. Maybe rot had an end point. Maybe I was heading toward stillness. Peace. Compost.

Because that’s the secret no one talks about: rot is also renewal.

It’s not just destruction. It’s transformation. The apple becomes soil. The body feeds a forest. Fungi bloom in the corpse and birth new ecologies. The logic of rot isn’t chaos. It’s alchemy.

I wanted that. I wanted to believe my decline had purpose. That all this softness, this collapse, meant something. That I could be useful, even as I fell apart.

So I tried to make art from it. I collected mold samples in jars. I wrote odes to mildew. I painted in shades of brown and green and blue that made people wrinkle their noses. I sewed dresses that looked like they had grown from wet ground. Someone in art class said it reminded them of a drowned Victorian. I said thank you.

I stopped hiding it. The rot. I let it show. In the way I dressed. In how I spoke. I stopped trying to sound cheerful and started sounding true. Some people left. Others came closer.

One girl told me my eyes looked like they belonged to something that died thoughtfully. I think she meant it as a compliment.

And in a way, I did die. Or maybe I just molted. Shed the version of myself that was pretending not to be rotting. Let the truth of me swell and stink and split.

Because there is beauty in entropy.

There is mercy in falling apart. When you stop trying to preserve yourself, you make space for change. When you admit that you are in decay, you can finally see what might grow from it.

I am still soft. Still strange. Still full of fungus and fear. But I am learning to map the logic of it. To trace the cycle and see the shape it makes.

Not a straight line.

A circle.

Rot to soil. Soil to seed. Seed to bloom.

And maybe,

Maybe to apple again.

Maria Buczak is a queer, disabled, aspiring, Polish essayist who lives in Scotland, and who writes about their unique perspective of the world.