The flowers hate me.
I have drunk every riverbed dry.
I have skinned every tree of her leaves.
I have whispered the wind’s secrets to the open fields, and now, the crickets are rabid with gossip.
I have angered the sun, lit her in an irreconcilable inferno.
I have fooled the innocent fawn and lost her in the cruelty of the woods.
I have made the earth quake in fear, tear herself apart, and wail for all the silence that I plagued her with.
I have taken her kin and wrung the color from them until they bled every flower’s pride from themselves to be forever condemned to the darkness of the unforgiving expanse beyond.
I have taken her name and dethroned it with a severe jerk of the soft hair matted to her tender scalp, stolen it from her in harsh motion, left her bare and frigid.
I have driven a javelin through her core, idly standing by as she bleeds her beauty away, drains into a pale capsule of all she once was and never will be again.
I have plucked every petal and torn each across the delicate veins streaming in webs.
I have dragged every petal through the muddied waters and burned them until the sky blackened in hate.
I have split every stem and twisted it tortuously so that it snapped a hundred times over.
I have stripped every root and dried them in the dying sun.
I have made a menace of my name.
So, yes.
The flowers hate me.
The flowers I had once watered so patiently. The blooming drafts of ideas untouched, unloved, withering pitifully, yet forever discarded on an old page tattooed with the ugly, indelible scars that burn a constant reminder into my every day.
I convince myself time and time again that the literature pouring from my mind really isn’t that. Instead, it’s some diluted mess of uncoordinated attempts, ridden with a disease of incapability. It’s revolting and convoluted like the hideous scrawls a few lines above this one, utterly and terribly foul-natured. It’s the unkept Hyde fed by the uncaring, ignoring Jekyll. My own monstrous Dorian Gray emerges in reflection of the writing I refuse to deem worthy.
And so, I stopped watering the flowers, or so did that pessimistic creature rising from my reluctance. I twisted the potential of the flowers so deviously so as to justify my abandonment of them. They wouldn’t make it anyway. I didn’t realize I had been tossing water at them in the cold dark. I never showered them in the light I spread to others. I never offered even a glimpse.
It turns out, the water wasn’t enough, yet to me, the flowers were terrible for their incompetence, my incompetence.
Maybe, the flowers never hated me.
Maybe, I hated the flowers, for I expected them to bloom without the sun.
