Reminders I let my flowers die; they needed to be watered. I knew they needed to be watered, so why did I let them die? At first I fed them occasionally, but it feels easier to let them starve. It's just fucking easier to let them starve. So I did nothing and watched them starve. But flowers don't die suddenly- every day a little weaker, every day, a little weaker. Fading into fragile carbon ghosts. But indoor flowers, when dead, don't blow away. Unlike tumbleweeds, they stay. Dead and shriveled they have to stay, and they remind you that you killed them.
During the spring of 2020, I had planted a bunch of flowers and herbs in pots to give myself something to look forward to besides the looming and continuing months abashed by COVID. When I moved into my apartment over the summer with my ex and one of their friends, they came with and perched on the windowsill in front of my desk.
As the summer wore on, my mental health decreased rapidly. I struggled to complete my work at my internship, making food became a hassle, and completing chores around the apartment proved impossible. Watering my plants fell into this category. Every day as I stared into the distance during meetings, my eyes would glaze over my ever-wilting plants. I knew I could save them via exerting 30 seconds of work, but they no longer brought me any joy, so I couldn’t find the energy.
One day, I noticed that my flowers were beyond saving, and I broke down sobbing. Everything I had been holding in broke through the dam as this final drop of water pushed against the cracking stone. As a last-ditch attempt to pull myself together, I whipped out my hummingbird journal to scribble down my explosive and detrimental thoughts. My mind stayed fixated on the death of my flowers, and I jotted down my feelings in the form of this poem.
To me, the most notable, and somewhat cringy, aspect of this verse is the repetition. But when my mind races with words, phrases, and negative thoughts, I tend to fixate on one line and repeat it over and over again to myself. Everything becomes related to this one line. So in the poem, this repetition represents the “phrase earworm”.
I believe it to be quite clear that the flowers in the poem tie directly to my mental and physical health at the time. Like the flowers slowly drifted from reality, so did I. I’m enamored with the line “Fading into fragile carbon ghosts” due to the fact that it refers to the flowers and also a person since the building block of all life is carbon.
In the last stanza, I wanted to capture the idea that you have to keep living with yourself after you’ve gotten to that low mental state. Every day you get up and look in the mirror you have to face what you have molded your life into. Like the dead flowers, until you do something about them, the shriveled plants, or thoughts, will sit there burdening the room, or your mind.