Here at home, the basic pantry should be: coffee, eggs, and flowers, even if sometimes I go days without eating just to indulge the whim of keeping the vase full and my heart racing from the half pot I drink every day and later regret.
The investment I make in those terminally ill ones gives me a bit of meaning, sometimes for five days, and, in the best of luck, fifteen. It feels more noble and simpler to change their water daily, protect them from the heat, add vitamins to a small bouquet of flowers slowly losing their lives from the moment they were torn from the earth and mutilated without permission, than to care for myself in order to live my own. The infamous Catholic guilt that no longer walks with me only gets in the way, and still I grant it reason every time I believe “I’m not fit to live, I live to serve,” and then I politicize my guilt by refusing myself as a contributor to anything useful at all.
Between usefulness and intelligence I lose myself with no intention of being found. How heavy the body becomes when it moves without meaning. My soul slips away in little fragments and my chest no longer hurts when I cry. I rest my bones in bed for endless hours every day until my flowers wither or the coffee pot is finally empty.
I’ve forgotten many words, and also how to conjugate them; I suppose this is what it feels like to die little by little. The fear of truly dying makes me carry a small piece of wood and “knock on it,” just as Adriana once told me that was how she had “saved herself from so many things.” I wonder if flowers, when they arrive home, also feel they’ve forgotten something, what the sun felt like on their petals, for instance, or how to stretch themselves toward the sky; whether their sister flowers remained in the field or died a little along with them.
Photography by Armando Belsoj.
