I wondered aloud as I stared at the fresh flowers arriving on my doorstep this morning on Valentine’s Day. They were peach-coloured roses, wrapped in pink paper wraps, looking dainty and fresh, having no idea that within a week they’d wither and die. Well, I knew.
I have always loved flowers as long as I can remember and people have been reprimanding me that “they don’t even last that long.”
Flowers, though they’re incredibly pretty, have such a fleeting life, that if you turn your back a bit too long, they rot.
“So what do you do when they rot?”, people would ask. “Beside, why keep them at all if you know they’re gonna rot?”
I stared at my fresh bouquet, alive and pretty. Then I stared at my dried flowers which I stored in front of my room on my couch. Dozens of it, all dead and dried with a memory of the beauty they once had been. Sooner more than later, these pretty flowers in my arms are gonna face the fate of the previous ones — dead.
Funny as it might sound, I refuse to put my flowers in a vase and water them so they can live longer. I always keep them in their wrappings, just the way I received them. People say I’m not giving them a chance to live. I say I am preserving the memories each flowers hold.
Yeah, memories. Maybe memories is the answer to the question.
Because in each bouquet of flowers attached memories of what was going on in my life then. Like when I stared at my five-year-old died roses on my couch, I remember. I remember that it was my sixteenth birthday on a Monday. I remember the memories of my friends surprising me with a cookies and cream birthday cake and I blew the candles during lunch break. I remember giving a piece of cake to my crush, but he didn’t know it then. Then came the flowers.
I think of flowers as my version of a photograph. I capture my memories in a bouquet of flowers. Like what Ed Sheeran said, “we keep this love in a photograph, we made these memories for ourselves, where our eyes are never closing, hearts were never broken, and time’s forever frozen, still.”
Flowers don’t last. Memories do.
Flowers rot, memories never do.
Flowers are my photograph.
When I look at them now, they may have lost the beauty they once possessed, but the memories cling. They are evidence that good things happen sometimes, and when I’m having a bad day, or a bad week, or even a bad year, I look at them and remember that this too shall pass. Because from time to time, I receive a bouquet of flowers and they are reminder that good days happen too. Hearts will mend and heal.
