Budded
The flowers planted along the church’s stone walls never looked a day past bloom, each of their petals as perky as they were the day before. Somehow surviving the winter winds and blistering cold. Somehow persisting through the birds that invade their sanctuary. Somehow maintaining their sculpted figure. I wonder if the sun whispers to you while he touches your face. Does he point out to you that your neck is drooping ever so slightly? Remind you that the browning rim of your petals depreciates your value, strips you of the only reason you’re kept alive. How tragic it must be to exist in the constant pursuit of beauty.
Almost as if in response to my questioning, you shed, in quiet agony, another petal over my shoulder. It falls beside my palm. A failed attempt to hold onto something, rather than to be held. Suddenly I feel guilty, my hands are heavy with the blood of your stems. I wonder if you knew how much people loved to touch the parts of you that hurt. The parts that were yanked from the ground and cut down to fit better. Match the pattern of their upholstery better. Wonder if you understood you were a currency of love, a way to say I’m thinking of you and you look lovely. A way to apologize for a bad day, or plan for a good night. Would it change how your face fell as you aged if you did? Would you feel a sensation of peace as you died, in an unfamiliar place, hidden beside other petalless corpses mounted for decoration, all because it was in the name of love?
My mother never taught me not to pick flowers, never explained to me that you were just as alive as me. Just as alive as my baby sister. A small patch of flowers grew alongside the far fences of the softball field. After each Wednesday night, once the game had ended and my father joined us at the bleachers, his forehead dripping with salty beads of sweat, I’d run to them. Graze my little fingertips over their faces, watch them dance in the wind to the rhythm of their scented song. Awaiting permission. I wonder if you knew them the way one knows an old neighbor. Or if they are to you, as they were to me: perfect strangers. I plucked them as gently as I could muster and carried them in bunches to my mother, trying not to trap their delicate limbs between my fingers. I’d shoved them in her face with a smile so wide it showcased every missing tooth and told her I plucked them just for her. As if they grew there in that same corner every season just for her.
Maybe if she had told me then that those flowers’ petals would rot away within mere hours because of what I had done you wouldn’t be stuck here. In this poorly lit room, staring at the same four walls all day. Maybe we would have crossed paths differently, beneath the shade of a thousand-year-old tree, a few feet away from funny-looking mushroom heads and fallen twigs that snap when you look at them. Maybe I would have seen you, felt your petals, and understood the browning at their edges. Would’ve smiled softly at the sight of your shedding. Maybe then I would’ve realized that you were brave before I realized you were beautiful.
Elianiz Torres is a senior creative writing major at SUNY Geneseo. She began writing in middle school and has since discovered a deep and consuming love for poetry & non-fiction. Her writing often focuses on themes of family and womanhood.