Timeless (from Pinterest)

These flowers wilt, dried out in the dark, like my old drafts of writing I discard.

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.