Dying Sunflowers

There was someone in my life once who gave me a bouquet of sunflowers, and I took care of them day and night. They were their favourite flowers, so much that they had a dried one stitched onto their hand, its petals weaved into their veins and the stem tied around their wrist, their own version of a lucky charm, to match my own.

It felt different from when I was sixteen. I didn’t have to force myself this time. No wonder it hurt so much when it was over.

I had a multitude of photos of us, my room had become a liveable photo album. They were everywhere. On my walls, on my windowsill next to the flowers, covering my mirror up. I never once woke up to find them gone, even my other self was in love with them.

Now my room is adorned with wallpaper, slowly peeling away from how I cut the photos out. My walls had bled every second we had spent together.

And the wallpaper? Sunflowers on cerulean. I can’t even remember choosing it. Maybe they did. Maybe it transformed on its own to mock me.

We did everything together. We would watch Temporary Monarchs and eat embarrassing amounts of junk food, and talk for hours about nothing. I can’t remember a single conversation we had, now that I think about it.

And then, in a heartbeat, it was over. It wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, I didn’t deserve it.

With time they started to fade, there were nights where I could almost convince myself that I had imagined it all. I started misplacing the gifts they had bought me, with each lost item a memory of them was lost too, until I could no longer remember anything about them, only that they were gone. It never stopped hurting.

And then I couldn’t deal with it anymore, so I stored my sadness in the soil of the very flowers they gave me, in the pictures that showed me our past, happy selves, before everything went down. The only pictures I could bear to keep. The only proof I have that it really happened. I’m mostly numb now, I stay away from them in case it comes all rushing back.

The flowers started to wither eventually, I refused to take care of them any longer, but at the same time I couldn’t throw them away. My negligence lead to their demise, but my sadness fuels them and keeps them in a state of half-life, a perpetual death. So they sit there mirroring my soul.

I know that I will die when those flowers do.