Flowers

Dead flowers, he thinks to himself, is such a strange thing to collect. He flips through a scrap book where each page is a different smashed flower that has been laminated to the page. The browning edges of rose pedals. the yellowing hue of fading lily, and the fading purple of an orchid immortalized on the pages.

He flips through the book as he goes through the things buried deep in her closet. Of course it is the responsibility of the husband to go through her things after she passed, but he expected it to be the things that he related to her the most that hit the hardest. Yet, here he is, holding this book that she likely made before the two of them moved in together - a bit of her life that she had long since left behind for the melding of their lives together - that has him feeling the most amount of emotions thus far.

He imagines the way she must have walked through a field, or going through a garden, or growing the flowers herself and then grasping them as they began dying to capture that moment exactly. He thinks about how many times she must have paid attention to the exact same flower to ensure she got them at the exact point in time. He wonders if there were ever friends, or former lovers, who would do this with her.

Though their marriage had lasted for nearly two decades, she had an entire life before him. A life he was not apart of, a life that even though they had talked about, he couldn't exactly know the kind of person she was before he came along. He thinks about how much different her life could have been had they met sooner, or never met at all, and he thinks about how much he loved seeing her eyes peer through her long hair and framed her face in a way that made the sincerity in her eyes appear so dynamic that he can nearly remember every small detail within the universe they contained.

He finds a type of flower he had never seen before towards the middle of the book. It is a yellowish hue and almost makes a face within the pedals. She had drawn tons of little ghost figures all around it before the lamination happened, with one of them poking out from behind the flower itself like it was coming out of hiding. In very overly flamboyant font that she had hand drawn out, it says "Ghosts are Spooky," which reminds him of how dynamic her comedic presence was when they met.

That comedy died off relatively soon after they had moved in together. It was never intentional, it is just how life happens when work and compromise and responsibilities get in the way, but he remembers just how fucking funny she was - how he would laugh with her unlike anyone else he had ever met in his life, and how much he misses that part of her. Even how much he didn't realize how much he had grown to miss her comedy even before her passing.

And then he remembers the way he felt the first time they kissed. That embrace of their bodies in a hug sent a shockwave through his entire body, and then their lips met and the universe ceased to exist. Time folded in on itself and years of his life played out in front of him as he realized he wanted her to be with him for the rest of his life, and then when the kiss ended and reality came back to him he found himself wondering what exactly happened in the first place. Their eyes met, and her eyes were the softest, most pure thing he could have ever imagined seeing. The memory of those eyes bring about a well of tears.

She was his best friend, even throughout all the changes they had to make to endure the years. They grew closer together. Their favorite times in their life had still been when it was just the two of them, and they could just indulge in listening to one another talking about whatever things they wanted to express with great passion behind their words.

But, she was gone now. He was never going to hear a rant about the inequality between men and women. She would never get to hear his anger take over as he discussed the political hellscape the world had become, and he didn't want to share that with anyone else.

He could not contain the tears even if he had a desire to, and right now the thought of him crying was so far behind his mind that he couldn't even acknowledge that it was happening at all.

He finds himself wishing he could have known her when she was picking the flowers, and he wishes he could have been the one walking with her while she was looking at them to find the perfect one for her scrap book. He wishes he could see the way her entire body would illuminate with joyous celebration when she found the perfect one, or how she would analyze the pedals to see if they would start wilting in just the right way for the vision she had. Or maybe it was far more fluid, and it would just work out perfectly at a time when she wouldn't expect it and then excitement would fill her existence.

He wishes he could just see her excited one more time, but he knows that would just him wanting even more.

He looks towards the side of the couch she would always sit on and instinctively reaches his hand out to hold hers, even though not even the ghost of her is there. For just a moment, though, he can feel the warmth of her hand.

He knows he will likely never recover from this. He doesn't even know if he wants to.

He just wants to love her.

He just wants to continue to love her.

And he will, and the next time he walks past a flower he will wonder if it is getting close to the point of changing colors. There are plenty of blank pages in the back of her book, and he knows how to laminate pages.

He knows it is time to start collecting flowers.

-Dustin S. Stover