It’s insidious.

It wafts about virtually unseen until it accumulates in deceptively pretty, golden drifts. It collects in the crevices and at the interstices of your newly-washed car, your lawn furniture…your innocently-gaping throat and nostrils. Your eyes.

But those are mere diversionary tactics.

It wants your brain.

It’s pollen. The wild, golden child of all those lovely Spring catkins gracefully dipping and swaying in the breeze.

It is the zombie of the plant world.

It wants your brain.

And it shall have it.

Oh, sure, you can try to stave it off with any number of chemical weapons. But sometimes you don’t want to risk the accompanying lethargy. Sometimes you don’t relish the idea of every moist membrane of your body being converted into dry, cracked parchment. Your vivid imagination conjures up sinuses lined with something resembling California’s drought-ridden soil, webbed with arid fissures.

You don’t want that.

So you decide to power through the discomfort, hawking and coughing all the way.

By the time you are reduced to a wheezing, gelatinous mass, abandoned by friends and family because, let’s face it, you’re kind of disgusting like this, you begin to crack. Much like the California drought-ridden soil. The tiny crevices gather and grow and intersect and become one glorious gape.

You shatter.

You take the antihistamine. And it’s not the non-drowsy version, because, well, you’re still laboring under the delusion that you can power through anything the season dishes up. A sign your brain is already under siege.

In a few hours you will blink stupidly instead of speaking cogently. You will nod off over your keyboard. You will struggle for the words just out of reach. You will lick dry lips to no avail. You will rub dry eyes to a sandpapery texture.

You will fix the world in your deadened, dry gaze, and realize the final enormity of your defeat.

You and pollen have become one. You are the outward manifestation of pollen.

Zombies both.

It wanted your brain.

And it got it.