We had to bring an object describing ourselves. Too lazy and too scared to reflect deeply, I plucked the flowers out of m hair and held them in my wounded hands. There were three. They were purple, with magenta centers. They were fake, and their texture was course and plastic like. They were me, I told myself. Fake, plastic, an imitation, trying to be real. Pretending to myself.
For some odd reason incomprehensible to me at the time, you thought I wasn't fake. You thought I as real. To you, I was the most realistic, the most tangible, the most alive. You dissapeared for a moment
And when you returned, you were holding two very real flowers. They looked like the paper weights that my grandfather brought to the hospital the day after I was born. The were white, and pure, and alive, and I held them in my sweaty palms, crushing their delicate stems. I twirled them in my hands, detaching their petals. I wanted them and their harsh reality, their harsh whiteness, to die. I wanted them to bleed red on the grass. I didn’t want them to exist and thereby prove that I was alive, and pure, and white, and still growing.
Despite my efforts to destory them, when I opened my hands, they looked just as the had before. They were resilient to the pressure.
I brought them back to my room afterwards and forgot them in between and bottle of toothpaste and a package of band aids. When I cleaned up the wooden desk I found them there, wilted, dead, and graying. I tossed them in the plastic trash can on top of old bananna peels and used tissues.
I forgot about the flowers. I forgot about you. By that time, you were gone. We were all gone, and the future was starting to gray and fade into the unrealistic, abstract, unknown past.