All The Flowers She Loved
She sits on a park bench while the falling snowflakes settle on her eyelashes. Wishing for the spring she loves, she blinks them away. She never liked the crisp air of winter. She never liked how everything seemed dead. She thought the icicles that dripped from tree branches made a mockery of the green leaves that belong on the trees. She longs for the flowers to grow and dot the ground with their vibrant color. “Why is everything white in winter? A season should not be just one color.” she thought. And while she sits and thinks of more reasons why the coldest season is the worst season, her thoughts wander.
She starts to think about the pair of deep blue eyes that have started to curse her dreams. Every time she drifts off to sleep the eyes come back. In them she can see the waves of the ocean lapping upon shore. She feels them call out to her, asking her to step out of the light and into the darkness so she may finally see the face the intoxicating eyes belong to. She takes a cautious step forward and he appears. His tall body towers over her small frame. His hair is the color of sunlight falling upon a golden meadow. He smells like late summer nights and fresh-cut grass. She runs to him like he is the only living thing on this earth. As she throws her arms around him, he vanishes. Leaving her on the cold ground as she wakes from the cursed dream.
She brushes the snowflakes off her jacket. She woke with a start and toppled into the snow. She cannot remember why she was even sitting outside in the first place. All she can think about is the man from her dreams. Her stomach knots itself while she wishes that just once she could touch him. That he could put his arms around her. That she could lose herself in him; and in that one moment she knows that if she could finally hold him, the hole in her heart would be filled. The same hole that gets a little bit bigger each time she dreams of him. She becomes consumed with the idea if him. She starts to forget that he is only from a dream and becomes haunted by the pair of eyes she sees every time she closes hers. Some days she believes the tears that stream down her face will never seem to stop. The longing for him, the longing for spring, the longing for the things that will never be hers have swallowed her. Her view of reality becomes distorted. She is stuck in her own insincere world. She is perpetually waiting for things that will never come. The ice of winter has frozen her heart and mind in time and space. She never once realized that the winter she despised so much had ended and spring had come and gone. For she will never see the flowers she loves until she has the man of her hallucinations.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
Hi there.
You have an interesting piece here. I feel, however, that the pouring-yourself-out-on-paper should have been a little more filtered out. There isn't much story here, which is fine, but you do need to let your characters take some time out from telling us what her imaginary 'man' makes her feel.
It's a nice enough premise and you can work with this. Maybe try explaining how it all started? The protagonist, as I said before, goes on describing what the boy makes her feel ("Her stomach knots itself while she wishes that just once she could touch him.") and it gets a little tiring to read after a while when the reader realizes that that's all there is to it.
Then, when you say stuff like: " All she can think about is the man from her dreams." and "That she could lose herself in him; and in that one moment she knows that if she could finally hold him, the hole in her heart would be filled. " it will most definitely act as a turn off for the reader. Because we've encountered lines like this in countless places and they have lost all the depth they once (maybe?) had. They don't really mean anything anymore and I, personally, find them too generic for my taste. Your character obviously is going through something, showing as she does so much emotional longing for a person that may not exist. I feel you are doing them some disservice by resorting to cliches.
Why not try another spin? Instead of writing it the way it is now, take away all the romantic undertones and put more concrete stuff. Make the character do more than just sit and whine about the weather. Don't get me wrong. Sitting and whining about the weather is interesting too, but you have to execute that in a way that wouldn't bore the reader.
What you can do with this (And I do this with my work very often) is leave it alone for a considerable amount of time, then come back to it and go through it again. Typos like this: "She becomes consumed with the idea if him" would get fixed, and you can highlight sentences you feel you'd need to work with. Re-writing helps a lot.
Well, that's all I guess. It's an interesting topic and you should work on this piece and hopefully it will be a nice read.
Un.
I genuinely enjoyed this story! The thought of loving someone who only exists inside your mind is... lonely actually. I mean, The only time she could ever see him is within her dreams, and if he keeps disappearing, well... that sucks xD I so hope you expand this story in some way (Maybe write more stories to follow?
). It reminds me of a lucid dream I had (Not to this extent, but yeah), where this person who i really cared about kept disappearing right as I tried to hug them.
There are a couple minor errors with words, for example, In "She becomes consumed with the idea if him." I do believe you intended on saying "idea of him".
As Flite pointed out, I also do not see any relevance the title has to the actual story.
Other than that, It's a really good start to what could potentially be a longer story(I'm hoping so, at least!)
Keep on writing,
~Nora
I don't why but I'm going to start off with the title. It was the title that pulled me in because it was quite eye catching. However, after reading this I don't quite see how the content relays back to the title. Call me pedantic, but I think titles are just as important as the content of your story. Your title should reflect what's at the core of your story. Just a little something to think about.
Alrighty, let's move onto the actual story. I think this short story is quite unique in its own way, because the man that she's longing from doesn't actually exist but sprung up from her own imagination. The idea itself would provide groundwork for some interesting development, have you thought about expanding this a bit?
The idea is good, however, the way you wrote it could use a little tweaking. Until the end of the story, I thought this was an angsty, teenage love story about unrequited love because of how cliche all the descriptions were. Some them weren't bad, but most of them were coated with generalization. On top of that, the first paragraph didn't quite connect to the rest, I understand the idea of winter is a symbolism for loneliness or coldness or perhaps you were just trying to set the mood. But with her pondering about why winter is just one colour doesn't correlate with the man.
Let's move onto the second paragraph, the flashback. The flashback holds no fresh information about the character other than to provide an outlet for more sorrow and how she could not be with him. The flashback was also extremely abrupt, with no signs to indicate she was having one till the last paragraph. Which was basically a repeat of the previous paragraph, save for the one essential fact that this man comes from her dreams.
Your entire story doesn't have a structure, which makes it incredibly loose and floppy. It sounds more like a monologue than a short story, I'm sorry if I'm being blunt but that was exactly what it sounded like. There was no character development to our narrator at all, so I couldn't understand what the relationship was between them. My suggestion would be actually to open with the last paragraph and expand on the idea that he comes from her dreams instead. Otherwise, the story is flat. There is a whole lot amount of purple prose involved with the description, but no actual plot or character development.
You also need to vary your sentence beginnings a bit, you've start virtually every sentence with 'she'. It gets tiring and repetitive after a while, this goes with everything, not just sentence beginnings. Your sentence lengths as well.
In summary, really interesting idea, it's got potential, but you need to tweak your writing a bit to improve it. If you have any questions, please feel free to PM me.
-Flite