Flower Crowns

I've discovered that it's extremely painful to watch someone change.

Change isn't an immediate thing, either - you made sure of that. The last thing you wanted was attention.

It was a gradual process for you. the small things slipped first - a slight hunch of the shoulders, a smile that didn't quite reach the corners of your eyes - the things no one else seemed to take notice of. I assumed I was just looking too closely.

Then, the big things fell through. There were no more absentminded sketches on your overdue homework, or stray jokes told just for the satisfaction of hearing someone laugh.

Soon enough there was nothing left at all. While the rest of the world grew and blossomed around you, you remained silent; a gaping hole where your carefree personality once thrived.

I always imagined the inner workings of your mind as a meadow of sorts, the overwhelming-Sound-of-Music-musical-number kind, and I just assumed you would venture there every day, to the corners of your meadow even you had forgotten about, and plant little seeds of confidence one by one until you couldn't seem to do anything but evolve along with them.

But as we all know, even the best of gardeners cannot revive what's already lost.

I watched with a hidden terror as you destroyed yourself. Slowly, deliberately, you plucked out of the ground every blooming flower of emotion you had planted in that golden meadow of yours. I pretended not to see the way you tied the dying roses into crowns - the way you tried to fix what you'd become. I somehow convinced myself that if I didn't acknowledge it, you would slip back into your old state of mind. The meadow would replant itself, rose by dying rose.

When the rest of us recognized that who we used to know became someone who hardly knew himself, everyone stopped wondering what was wrong and accepted this unfeeling abyss as what you were. I did, too, for much longer than I'd like to admit. You faded into the background of things for an eternity or two - I can't tell you of a single instance this year when I've heard your voice.

Suddenly your silence was unimaginably loud. It was the silence after a nightmare comes to a sharp halt - when you're left there with the covers bunched haphazardly around your ankles and an unruly bead of sweat trailing slowly down the nape of your neck. You were a break in the familiar circle - the thing I came to secretly fear.

I decided avoiding you was the best solution. I suppose it was, at the time. I should've known that the harder I tried to ignore you the more I'd remember.

I'd remember the endless debates about the color of your eyes (they were blue, I've decided) and the sideways smirks I'd sneak glances at when you weren't looking.

It got to a point where these memories would engulf me. Things have always trapped me from time to time - I was used to overthinking. But there was never anything as hopeless as the empty echo of your name in my head. There were tears, I'm sure. In all honesty I've set up a wall between those memories and the rest of my being. That didn't stop them from tunneling under the shelter I'd constructed so carefully while I tried to cope with what I had left.

They'd invade silently - slithering nearer as a mass of tragedy and heartbreak and analyze my every move, my every thought until the moment was right. A flood of them, huge and unavoidable, would find their way to the surface of my thoughts.

I think the last stages were the worst.

I'd think of you daily - whatever straggling thought that found its way into my blank mind quickly morphed into you. I'd let the essence of you rule me until all I could make out was the rapid pounding of blood against my ears, and even the steady rhythm of that almost familiar throbbing eventually withered away into a nothingness so deep, I was left standing in nothing more than a frigid wasteland of dead roses knotted carelessly into crowns no child would ever dare to wear.

Just like you.