Three Ways to Preserve Flowers

Dried: 

She liked to save objects: The marbles in her kindergarten teacher’s shelf of games. The pretty napkins her classmates’ fathers lovingly packed into lunch boxes. The flowers in her foster mom's garden.

Especially the flowers.

She loved how even though they bloomed to die, even though they could never be as permanent as the sun that fed them; they were forever gorgeous. The flowers were brave. Regardless of their fate, they strove to be beautiful. She thought she was saving them when she preserved them. She was giving them a few more years of purpose. At least, that’s what her birth mother told her when she made flower arrangements around the house, the only thing they could afford to make the house cozy. 

Everything in the world was temporary. Her age. Her classmate’s friendships. Her mother’s love. If everything was born to disappear, she figured there was nothing wrong in using the little power she had to freeze the past. After all, her birth mother promised she would love her forever, yet she left her in the park on that rainy day. It took days for her to dry off.   

… 

Pressed: 

He always accused her of being pressed over the smallest things, like when he didn’t like pasta anymore or hated the carnival he used to love. He said she was obsessed with his past. “You can’t accept the fact that I change.”

But still, on Valentine’s Day he bought her a bouquet of flowers. “I know we’re going through a rough patch, but I love you.” She vowed to preserve the flowers. She pressed them into her cookbooks and displayed them on her kitchen counter. It was a figment of why they should still be together.

The night she found him in bed with another girl, the flowers watched her scream and cry. “Love is temporary. Everything is temporary,” she repeated over and over. She couldn’t bear to throw the flowers away. They were a symbol of a past love, of a relationship that used to burn with passion. 

…

Hung: 

Her children chose to leave her alone in her house of frozen memories. They said, “You have some kind of hoarding disorder.” They moved out as soon as they could.

Now that her hands were wrinkled and her hair was silver, for the first time, she felt lonely. She felt no comfort seeing the flowers dried on her counters, the flowers pressed in her books, the flowers hanging from the chandeliers.

If only her mother had never taught her that love was temporary. If only someone saw the way she obsessively prolonged each little thing in her life that was good. If only she could live in the present and not in the past.

If only, if only, if only. The words spun in her head. She looked up at her hanging flowers. How beautiful they were.

The next morning the police found her dead body hanging with the flowers. 

Preserved Forever:

When her family cleared out her home, they kept one small box of memories for her. Her childhood toys: marbles, pretty napkins. A bouquet of flowers with a Valentine’s card.

And the flowers. The dried ones, the pressed ones, the hung ones. 

by CHELSEA GUO