He Brought Me Flowers.

The moment I saw the flowers in his hand, I looked around, as if expecting to find a stranger in my house whom I had previously failed to notice. He didn't hold them out to me. As he entered through the doorway, he set them down on the table, alongside the other bags of groceries and vegetables.

"You brought me flowers." I said, because I needed him to confirm that they were, in fact, arrogated to me.  

"I did," he said, walking over and kissing my head, "Let me put them in some water for you."

I don't know what those flowers are called, they're white and they grow on the trees that line the empty spaces between the  identical houses in our neighborhood. I don't like them as much as the white flowers that grew in the empty spaces between the identical houses of our previous neighborhood. Those ones grew wild and overnight, amongst weeds, in water-logged soil, after it had just rained, these were planted, evenly spaced, by a man who was undoubtedly instructed by a landscaping committee. I don't like gardens, I like forests. We should have let topiaries die when Alexander Pope took his satirical rapier and blew them to smithereens. Shaping the wilderness in aesthetics that please human sensibilities seems like a bad business, the hubris of assuming what grows around you must satisfy not just your needs, but also your eyes. I say that, as a hypocrite, because I routinely bring white flowers home to please my eyes. I put them in my weird 3-D printed vase that looks and feels like nothing in the world. Sometimes I put them in my weirder headless-human vase.

But it is always I who does it.

He knows I love looking at white flowers through my day, but he had never brought me flowers before then. My favourite thing about the couple I most admire is that he brings her the fragrant jasmine flowers she loves every day, not as an arrangement, but wrapped in newspaper, and without making a gift of them to her he puts them in a vase by her desk so they're always there. For thirty years she's had a vase full of fresh flowers she never had to worry about putting there herself. I can envy that. I can admit to envying that, and every once in a while, in the kind of moment of wistful longing where you allow yourself to embody the visceral emotional experience of the life of another, I may have playfully accused him, as I plucked flowers from bushes like a naughty child, of never bringing me flowers as I wondered what that kind of life may have been. I don't mean it. I don't really mean it. I think I say it because making myself aware of the sorrow of not living every single possible experience is something I use to hurt myself, to keep myself in a state of slight pain. I want that but I don't actually want him to bring me flowers.

He knows that, my garrulity makes it impossible for information to exist that I haven't communicated to those living beside me. He has never seemed particularly interested in bringing me flowers either. It's just not us, if we did it, it would feel like we are forcing glorified ideas of romance to make ourselves more beautiful, like embalming a corpse, it may serve a purpose but it doesn't make them less dead. That doesn't mean he doesn't find ways to show me that he cares about my comfort, I haven't had to worry about buying menstrual products in seven years, I don't know where they come from but they're always there when I need them. I like knowing where the flowers come from and that's why I bring them myself, he tells me their names and I forget them on purpose a moment later. He laughs when I look up from my keyboard, see the flowers and remark at how much joy they bring to me. He doesn't try to create that joy for me, he doesn't take charge of it, wild symbols of whimsy in unnatural surroundings is a pleasure just for me, one that I give to myself.

So as he put the flowers in my vase, and they fell apart immediately because the stalks were too long, I started to cry. The redolent fragments of nature that lay in my strange vase made me weep, but they were tears that could not have been explained, he assassinated me without intent. Sometimes your inner-life becomes so rich you are living stories those around you wouldn't fathom, they couldn't know that breaking off a stalk from a tree and bringing it home could break a heart. I hate it when he breaks my heart without meaning to do it.

"Why are you crying?" He asked.

"You brought me flowers." I said.

..........

By night the flowers were already withering, that's not unusual for these flowers, they die so quickly. I saw them, from the corner of my eye as I looked up from the floor. He was kicking me, dragging me across the house in a deranged frenzy of violence. As my eyes fluttered shut and then open, the vision before me oscillated between white flowers and darkness, as I opened and closed my eyes in response to his boot against my thighs. He stepped over my body and emerged in front of me. One by one, he placed each boot onto either hand, and bent over to grab my hair, I looked up to see his shoes, and without really thinking about it, extended my tongue to the leather.

"You're getting my shoe all dirty," he remarked, kicking my flapping tongue.

But he didn't pull back so I continued to lick his shoe. I will never understand how I am able to look past all compunction of dirt and disease when I do that, I wil throw out ice cubes if someone in my family touches them even for a second, but I will lick dirt off a shoe if it hurts me. You'd think it would be something noble like self-effacing devotion, but it isn't, it's just the erotic thrill of feeling like so little. A speck of dust. A morsel of garbage. Inconsequential filth. Dirt that isn't even so dirty it warrants cleaning.

"I told you that you're getting my shoes fucking dirty," he said, pulling me off his shoes and dragging me once again.

He sat on the edge of the couch, beside the table with the flowers, and shook my head around like it wasn't attached to anything human. Each time he stopped, he launched a barrage of backhanded slaps to my mouth. I used to swoon a little when he threatened to slap me in the mouth, now it makes me shudder. I wonder if it's a sick cycle, first you turn trauma into pleasure, and then pleasure, back into trauma. Perhaps that is the mercurial nature of sexuality, as soon as you figure it out, it changes yet again. As he slapped me repeatedly, knocking my hands out of the way as they instinctively leapt to protect my face, I started to cry. He made the face of feigned impatience he always makes when he deems that my emotions and my humanity are getting in his way. He held my hair in one hand and with the other swatted the swelling on my lips until I stopped shaking, but it didn't stop the tears. He grabbed the bouquet of flowers from the vase, dropping it to the floor as he bunched them in his palm, and swatted me in the face with them.

"Stop fucking crying, you annoying little cunt," he said, hitting me in the face with the flowers over and over again.

The petals fell around me. The noisome water from the stalks, sprinkled all over my thighs. He pushed me back onto the floor with his foot. He stood over me threw what remained of the flowers onto my face, most of them slid to the floor as they landed. He stepped to over to me, crushing them under his boot.

"Look what you made me do to the pretty flowers ," he said, tenderly stroking my chin with the tip of his boot, "You just can't have pretty things."

"Then why?" I asked, croaking from the side of my mouth that would still open, "Why did you bring me flowers?

"They were lying on the ground right outside the house," he said, stepping in my hair and watching my face, "I stepped on them as I came inside."

Whatever sorrow it was that ailed me earlier that morning, in a moment, it abated and replaced itself with laughter. I laughed and laughed. Violently. Wildly. With no planning nor structure. It was the kind of laughter that cannot be explained, an inside joke that only you can understand. He can understand why I love him for bringing me garbage flowers, but sometimes your inner life is so rich, only you can understand why that is funny. I could not explain how you could step on a discarded bunch of flowers, give them to your lover and harness joy.

"Why are you laughing?" He asked.

"You brought me flowers," I said.

.......