There a quality of lasting permanence about receiving them, and yet it is their maddening transience that strikes you. There is something captivatingly profound wrapped under their fresh sepals, and yet everything about them shouts frivolity and waste.
Flowers, that is. I like giving, and receiving them.
Some say it is a waste of money. Most would agree, and buy them anyway. For the language of flowers have transcended time, culture and race. It is a universal language. It declares love, subtly yet surely- love of the brave and daring kind, the kind that has overcome the fear of getting hurt, the fear of giving too much, too soon.
It is one thing to receive flowers, another thing to receive those that were thoughtfully chosen for you, stalk by stalk. The ones I received on my birthday were stunningly beautiful- I learnt you trekked all the way to the other part of the island just to get them for me, because you thought those flowers, fresh and tall and unbending, picked out amongst buckets and buckets of them stretching for miles, were beautiful, knew I’d think the same way too. I absolutely love them.
Yet, they all die. It is the most maddening and gut-wrenching fact of all. Still, we buy them. Still, we give them. Still, we receive these precociously transient gems graciously, with thanks, love and gratitude, because of the permanence of their memory, the memory we keep in our brown paper boxes, along with all the other ones.
They are like our friendships. Most last for seasons which end. Yet, nothing stops us from loving, from daring to love, from daring to invest, from daring to put ourselves on the line- and getting hurt. Just like the way nothing, nothing stops the quiet and bustling activity of life stirring beneath fast-asleep buds, nothing binds them from their eventual incandescent, luminent glory. We love, in the way flowers bloom- daringly, abandonedly.
Even though we know… the imminence of death.
We lose people along the way. Few friendships last for life. Flowers wilt, lives change, the people in photoframes too, and all we are left with, often, are brown-paper memories we cherish that provide no more than a lingering fragrance of what once used to stand proudly in a crystal vase, a stack of old photos taken with crazy poses and peals of laughter, holding no more than memories etched in our hearts.
That day, I was just thinking about things, the way I often do- thinking about what had happened, why we stopped being around each other, why it felt like I had lost an older brother who used to watch out for me constantly, why I missed you and the old times. And on the same day I saw you walk by me to someone else- yet, I noticed your slightest glance in my direction, and realised you missed that too- and then you walked by me in a little out-of-the-way fashion, not too obviously, to give me that cheeky, almost-lecherous smile as you walked by me, so that I would smile back- the way you used to.
I remember that smile.
It is a loss to lose the once-known familiar closeness. One often yearns for the good old times. Yet, it is only the bravest who dare venture out in faith and proclaim on higher ground that it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. I wonder constantly if I am that brave, that daring. It is easy to love Strangers, hard to love friends, harder still, to love family- only I know the coward who lurks beneath my skin.
It is a tragedy to watch flowers die, see them wilt away. Their edges crinkle, their petals brown, their leaves shrink and yellow like the fading dusk, and they stretch out their dying over an excruciating period of days- they never die all at once. Most people change the flowers in their vases at the first sign of death, at the closing ceremony after a glorious performance.
Yet, it is only the bravest who dare leave them in their vases and watch their dying glory, in vulgar candour. In the face of such fleeting transience, it takes a brave man or woman to love valiantly.
For do we stop buying, giving and receiving flowers, stop loving, daringly and unabashedly, because of the possibility of change, the possibility of death?
… No.
For when flowers die, it is not the end. We only enter into a different season, a different time. New seeds fall, new flowers bloom. We may miss old times, but we can revel in quiet joy for one another too, appreciating the exciting paths our feet have taken us, though we went different ways. Seasons, and not necessarily friendships, end. For I know even now, if someone came along and said an evil word against me behind my back, you would take him up and put him to the sword; if you saw someone break me into pieces, you would spear him without a thought- the way you would in the old times. Seasons, and not necessarily, friendships, change.
This taste left in our mouths is not what we call sour, but merely, bittersweet- like the lingering taste of black coffee sand, left like grit on our tongues at the end of a cloyingly sweet journey, sugared with condensed milk.
It takes a brave man or woman to love valiantly, in the face of the knowledge of such maddening transience. It takes a braver soul, still, to be able to mourn the wilting of flowers, embrace the end of seasons, and to look forward to new seasons ahead, to wish old friends well, and to look forward to new times ahead, though things may not be the same. Things seldom stay the same.
There is a splattering mess of paper-brown petals and sun-yellow pollen, withered petals and hunchback stalks at my window sill. The sight appalls and appeals to me at once. At once, the vulgar reality of death and transient life smacks me in the face, at the same time of the fond remembrance of a time that was beautiful, captivating and true.
And that is why I still buy, give and receive flowers with joy, why I always lap up their unrestrained, valiant blooming beauty like a good-old Kodak film moment, why I fight, tooth and nail, to resist the temptation, oh the cowardly temptation to stop running to keep pace of setting the distance from you and you and you, and why I never change them too soon but always, albeit between taking deep breaths to teach my heart the meaning of Courage, leave them long enough in their crystal vases-
– to watch them die.
