I dreamt last night that I was a flower in an endless field of flowers. We differed in size, occasionally, but past that, we all seemed to look exactly the same. Every one of us sat holding our petals in the darkness, unable to move, unable to talk, simply sitting and waiting, though it seemed none of us knew for what. I tried in vain to shift myself to look at the flowers to the left or the right of me, but it was simply impossible. I tried to lift what would have been the chin of my flower face to turn and look behind me, but felt as if my stem of a neck would break if I turned any further. I nearly lost a single, perfect petal in the process and so I gave up on my attempts. I was overcome with the strange sensation that the only thing I would ever see again was the backs of the flowers all lined in front of me, like soldiers in a parade. To look elsewhere or shift would distort the order we seemed to grow best in, so I did my best, after a few hours in darkness, to be content with looking at the backs of all of my compadres.
I couldn’t help but think that each and every one of them was pondering the exact same things I was though. If every single one of us is still sitting here, contemplating the exact same thoughts, then why are there no flowers whose petals have fallen, whose stem-necks have snapped from craning back up and over their fragile forms to finally see if they truly are just a flower among endless other flowers? In the darkness I thought that, perhaps, there were flowers who had tried, but I was simply unable to see them because it was so fucking dark. That and flowers don’t have eyes, usually. I pondered the fact that I could be the only flower in this field with eyes, so any amount of thought present in the other flowers is pointless, seeing as they don’t even know they are flowers. Blind people wouldn’t know that they are human if someone with sight hadn’t first told them; and, seeing as we’re all flowers, I highly doubted that any of my peers had mentioned it. Or maybe there were flowers in this field that had only mouths, just like I only had eyes. Hell, maybe a few of them had neither, but had sprouted little stem hands and could feel around. Or a nose that only smelled their surroundings and so they were forever lost in the bouquetic sensation enveloping them. Or, maybe none of these things were true.
So I sat and I sat, restless, as if it were my choice to be stuck there. Like a child waiting to grow up, I wasn’t at all sure what was ahead of me but I couldn’t wait a fucking second to find out. For days it seemed I was an unwavering example of complacence; not in the sense that I was ok with being stuck where I was but content in the fact that I couldn’t change it, so I just waited for it to change for me. Finally, it seemed as if a light was on the horizon. It bounced back and forth and in its wake came a small boy and in the boy’s wake followed his shadow, making him entirely more ominous as it swung back and forth in time with the light in his hand; a creepy, human metronome that reeked of botanical doom. Or would have reeked of it had any of the flowers in this field sprouted noses. As he came closer and closer though, I realized that he was very carefully stepping over each row of flowers. He was not the bull dozer of heavy feet that I had imagined him to be when he first appeared, and my flower heart seemed to slow down it’s beating, if only for a brief moment. I noticed that every few steps the boy would reach down and slowly pluck a single flower, roots and all, from the ground it was tethered to, stick them in a bucket that only now had come into focus as the object swinging from his other hand, then repeat this process in a very un-mathematical style. There was no order or meaning in his flower picking and it appeared entirely random.
Then, as he lifted one from the ground, I caught a glimpse of what looked like a tiny, green hand disappearing into his basket, waving wildly. I began to watch much more intently, almost certain of what I thought I had just seen. The boy picked up some flowers by their stems, making sure his fingers wrapped tightly around all branching stems and roots, yet he picked others by their petal-covered heads, almost as if he was making sure his palm covered everything that wasn’t green. This pattern continued, although rather sporadically and still, seemingly, with no numeric method or any reason that these flowers should to be stolen away. The boy disappeared behind me for what seemed like fucking ages and I was overwhelmed with the sense of fear that grips a small child walking into an old folks’ home to visit a relative for the first time. The sudden realization of the inevitability that this person or these people around you could potentially disappear at any time; and worse yet, the teenager revisiting that same relative and realizing that everyone around them exists almost solely on the relieving sense that it wasn’t them. I was suddenly aware that I was merely another existence in the horticultural version of assisted living. All I could do was pray to… something, anything, that I wouldn’t be next. The little boy was still behind me somewhere, I just knew it, but I feared turning my head and actually seeing what he was doing far more than I feared remaining ignorant of it.
Finally, the light from his bouncing lantern fell across my petals and for the first time, in seeing my dark reflection on the ground, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I actually was just like every other flower.
