On Monday I had a wake-up call. As I was walking through Atlantic Terminal on the way to my favorite flower and knick knack shop, my phone buzzed in my bag--I had an email from a guy in California about my up-coming trip there!
Have you ever had somebody who stays in your heart despite months of silence, who turns you on when you merely think of him on the subway, and who, when you do see his face on a skype call, both of you just smile at each other? Pablo Neruda describes coming "to the boundaries where nothing needs to be said"--I exist in that place with California man. That, along with much discussion about the personal and the political, is essentially what my California Man does to me.
I read his email by the subway turnstiles underneath my exit. What he wrote reduced me to tears that shook my ribcage for ten minutes. I let myself have it. I have seen the results of uncried tears. Now I knew I really deserved those flowers.
I went to the Flower and Knick Knack Store and the owner, a dorky but fashionable Japanese hipster, recognized me and came out from behind the counter. I asked for a $20 bouquet that included ranunculus and a pink peony. He put my bouquet together. I asked for him to take the orange flower out and put a blue one in. He smiled to apologize and hesitated. "It will be more. The blue flower is from Japan."
"Five dollars?" I asked.
He was relieved, "Yes."
"You see the blue flower has ah--soft leaves." He offered it to me to feel. They were softer than Lambs' Ears, much silkier.
"So they ship them all the way from Japan?"
"Yes."
Just then I got a text from a man in Pittsburgh, PA. He had been the first person I was ever in love with. I was 16. His text answered an earlier text about a gift his upcoming birthday: he wanted me in nothing but a ribbon. I had been thinking along those lines too.
I looked up at how my bouquet was shaping up.
"Could you put the peony?"
He smiled to apologize and hesitated again but before he could say anything, I asked, "Is it extra? That's fine.
"Can it be $30 all together?"
He was fine with the price.
"Where is the ranunculus from?" I asked beginning to realize that these flowers all had serious airline miles.
"Holland. The peony is too. Or sometimes it is from England. Most of the flowers come from Holland or South America. And then we have some from Japan. Like these leaves here," he pointed out some amazing leaves with wavy edges. "They stay green for weeks."
"So the Northeast doesn't really grow many flowers?"
"Well," he paused, "Not in wintertime."
I knew from the movie Maria Full of Grace that most picture-perfect roses come from countries like Columbia but I had always thought that the (pardon my elitism) classier looking flowers like ranunculus or peonies were local. They are flowers that look over-saturated with their own fertility, flowers that open, peak, and fade. The Columbian roses that fill the New York City corner stores never bloom.
I bought my flowers, hoping that they in their wildness, in their beauty, would mend my broken heart. I thought of a guy I knew from England who was due to come to New York in two weeks and wondered if it was even worth it--another relationship with a carbon footprint. Perhaps not as big of a carbon footprint as the flowers I was holding, but a carbon footprint nonetheless.
The Pittsburg guy and I texted all my walk home. Smiling feels good after tears. He is hard to get a hold of but when I do, there is nothing better. He can make me smile with a pun, a sentence that is so honest or honestly dirty, or simply a comment in which I am struck by how well he knows me despite our long hiatus. As I said, it feels good to be made to smile.
The man at the Knick Knack and Flower Store had told me to cut the flowers' stems and change their water every two days. I put them in a vase. I wrote the California man and told him how he made me feel.
It is Sunday now and I have not touched the flowers since I put them on the mantle piece in the living room. I have not heard back from the California man. The peony has changed from fluorescent pink to light pink to white, as the flower guy had told me it would. The England guy and I have talked extensively about his upcoming visit. One ranunculus dropped its head and broke its stem.
The flowers were glorious.
The only place I can be is here.
