My favorite gift has always been flowers. I think it stems from when I was a kid and my grandma would take me around her garden in Florida, or from frequenting the Chicago Botanic Garden with my family. I would always ask my mom to use her phone to take photos of any flower so that I could look at it later, then take 20 different photos from 20 different angles and leave them to rot in her camera roll. As I got older, flowers became markers of important moments like graduations, recitals, birthdays, and any day that carried a sense of significance. More than anything, I looked forward to the possibility of receiving them. Over the years I have come to the realization that while I love flowers for their diversity and aesthetic, I also love them for what they represent. Time.
When someone gives me flowers I keep them in my room on my bookshelf. Every day I get to wake up and look at my flowers, but after a week or so goes by they suddenly are dead. Why is that? I can never seem to remember seeing them dying, it’s always a sudden drop off between being colorful and vibrant to being droopy and dull. That never seems to make me able to throw them out though. I let them sit there, now able to admire them in a completely different way. Whether it’s tulip petals cinematically drifting down onto the warm toned wood or the single lily that never seemed to muster up the courage to bloom, I am able to see so much in each dulled color and drooped leaf. Then I realised maybe that’s why I’ve always loved them—they never let me forget that time is passing.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t even start to picture myself as an 18-year-old. It all felt so far away, with simple things like driving a car seeming completely foreign. Now, I can barely remember what it felt like to need a ride everywhere or bike just to get around. It all passed so quickly that the details blur together. I think that’s what feels so familiar about flowers—you never actually see them fading, you just look up one day and realize they’ve changed. My last time riding my bike before getting my license didn’t feel like a last, it just felt like another ride. There was no moment where I stopped and realized things were about to be different. In the same way, flowers don’t announce when they begin to fade; they just slowly become something new, and you only recognize the change once it’s already there.
Looking back at high school I can pick out so many experiences that mirror this exact notion, and know that I can expect many more in my last coming days. Whether it’s my last time eating lunch in a cafeteria or my last assembly in the auditorium, it’s only in hindsight that these moments will begin to carry more weight. I didn’t notice that the flower was fading, but with time I’m sure I’ll look back and see how beautiful the bouquet truly was.
