The Bouquet

I have always admired flowers. Perhaps it is due to the variegated hues or their fragile petals or the sweet aroma that they infuse in a room that instantly jostles through the veins. They have been the best of nature’s creations.

I have fancied a balcony in my dreams, however small overflowing with pots of colorful blooms swaying against the morning breeze while I sipped my cup of coffee brimming  with maternal pride.

But those dreams took a back seat when jobs took precedence and traveling around the clock made it harder to  realize the things that make you happy.To mask the stress ,I took more work than I could handle, gulped down cups of coffee like it was water and ran the rat race.

Sometimes a part of me still wished that I could pause the clock and stare at the wall or have some flowers adorn my desk.I often stopped at nurseries to watch the buds bloom to a young flower, tasting the first drops of rain and basking in the gentle warmth of sunshine.Such was my craziness.

I continued to behave like a clockwork,working through the week and reaching home in time just to warm yesterday’s soup and curl up on the couch to watch an out of date series. My home served just that purpose,to give me a roof above my head, allow me to sleep on a bed.

I took no effort to clear out my schedule to accommodate time for my own small pleasure of having a small flowering plant.

Somehow that translated to resentment over time. It only got worse with time passing.I was always bitter and frustrated.
Days rolled into weeks and the feeling grew with time.Was it my inability to cope with the stress at work or was it my attitude to take on more than I could chew and complain about digestive distress?Was it my way of escaping into a surreal universe where I was always right and excuses seemed the right way to take when all I needed was to take a break and think straight?

Perhaps my discomfort was growing over time, it became obvious to those around me. People tried to coax me, pieces of advice started to flow in on time management, anger issues,resentment,talking to a therapist. None of those things mattered .Not because they were not genuine .Because I knew exactly what my issue was.I was refusing to address it by citing trivial reasons. And I tried to push that  mound of moral issues under the carpet. Except that now that mound stood like a mountain under my feet. It was no longer an innocent pile I tried to tuck away. It was now out in the open to the prying eyes and wagging tongues.

One fine day my story got a new paradigm. I received something unusual .It was not a piece of advice or a an hour of counselling. It was a bouquet of flowers. Harlequin as I pictured. The stems were still tender and smelt of sap. The petals had been sprayed with little droplets of cold water giving them the appearance of glistening diamonds. The flowers smiled in resplendence. It was covered by a sheen of plastic perfectly tied with a dainty ribbon. There was a tiny note placed carefully among the flowers.

Watery letters spelled the name of the nursery it came from. I was slightly perturbed. Were not flowers supposed to make me smile ?Was this somehow not the root cause of my dilemma?

My mind surged back to the mysterious sender. I picked up the card and tried to decipher the handwriting. It gave away nothing. I was no Sherlock Holmes. I could not solve a case with a card with scrambled writing. I made my way to the nursery it came from.

It was a vast expanse of land, green with patches of vividly colored bulbs as far as my eyes could see. The sky was azure with cottony clouds. A palatial makeover to my penurious dream of a tiny potted plant. I continued to walk along the mounds breathing the aroma infused zephyr. Who was this secret admirer?

As I sauntered to the melody of the breeze, I suddenly stopped. The bouquet in my hand was a cage. Flowers cut off at their prime ,tied together to make some selfish soul like me happy for a few hours. Only to be tossed away later. It was cruelty like any other. Fake lives like I was leading. Masking my stress with coffee, sprayed with water to make it appear fresh. I held the shackles of what cut off these flowers from where they deserved. Not in bouquets or garlands. Not even in a tiny balcony suffocating to grow out of the pot. They deserved to be out in the open swaying to the melody of the wind, floating across the cerulean skies, feeling the sun warm their stems and the rush of cold water on their roots. They didn’t certainly deserve to sit on my desk at work absorbing my stress and abuses when I could not take the time out to enjoy their presence .

I was probably being someone’s bouquet too. That is the only way my feelings resonated with theirs.