The Flying Ship

The Flying Ship

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The Loveliest Thing

Once I saw a flower, blooming, yellow, in a field of green. Never touched by human hand, it had grown wild and beautiful. Its petals were long and golden, its stem was a thin, strong line of white. Its fragrance, it was intoxicating. I took a small trowel, and a pot, and gently, I pulled the flower out from the earth.

I took it home.

In its pot, I put it next to my window, on a small pillar. I did this so the breeze might be able to waft its gentle scent through my home. There too, it might receive enough light from the sun to be fed. I watered it every day. I took great joy in this single thing of such wonder in my house. The way the morning light fell upon it as I walked in the room, was enough to make me cry.

I'm not sure exactly what happened then. I was walking around, in a rush maybe, I was not paying attention to what I was doing. Stupidly, I knocked the pot off its pedestal. The pot broke on the floor. In a panic of anger with myself, I kicked the flower. I kicked it again and again, till it was irreversibly broken, pot in shards, yellow petals smeared on the ground. I couldn't look. What had I done? Even as rushed, for what? Sticky tape to return it to its former state? Glue? Paper clips, to save it from being a smear?
Even as I ran for a cure that I knew well would do nothing, the scent of it, always present in my home, wonderful, now common-place and expected, was gone. And my world was a little darker. Colours seemed dimmer.



I'm sorry.
I've tried writing this many times.

I'm so sorry.

I'll never forget.




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