Notes I Won’t Reread

I’ve always hated flowers.

Not the small, polite kind of hate, No i mean the kind that sits deep in your chest and makes your skin crawl just looking at them. I hate their smell, their look, their softness, their lies. I hate the way people smile at them like they’re something pure. They’re not. Thy’re parasites dressed in color, pretty corpses, dying slowly and pretending its beautiful.

People always say flowers make things better. “they bring life”. They say, they dont, they never do, They’re dying the second you cut them, You tear them from the ground, stick them in water, and call that love? , its not love, its decoration, you might as well hang a noose and call it a necklace.

When my mother died, the house was drowned in flowers. Every table, every chair, every corner was covered in bouquets, sympathy cards, fake comfort. The air was thick, too sweet too warm like it was choking me, You couldn’t take a breath without tasting perfume and death mixed together. I didn’t really see most of it. I spent half my time in the basement, hiding from my father’s fists and words. But I could smell it. Oh, I could smell it. That sweet, suffocating perfume curling up through the cracks of the floorboards. The flowers were everywhere, and I was down there, smelling them, thinking about how they had the audacity to exist while I was invisible, while my life was being bruised and beaten and ignored. And as thir petals started to fall, I remember thinking “good. Let them die too” .

But my hate didnt start there. No, it started much earlier, when i was a kid She had this one flower, a white rose. Her favorite. She kept it by the kitchen window, where the sun hit it perfectly every morning. She’d talk to it, touch it gently, smile at it like it was a child. Like it was me. I remember watching her, waiting for her to notice me standing there. She never did. Her whole world was that flower. So one day, I broke it. I just.. snapped the stem i was jealous i wont bother to lie at that point, And she turned around like I’d killed someone. Her face, I’ll never forget it. That sadness, that disbelief. She cried. Over a flower. Not me. Not the bruises I had, not the nights I sat quiet just to keep the peace, no, she cried for a flower. That’s when it started. That’s when I knew I could bleed and she’d still water that damn plant before she’d look at me.

Before she died, she told me something. “If you ever feel sad,” she said, “pick a flower and count the petals. By the time you reach the last one, your sadness will go away.” Sweet, isn’t it? The kind of motherly nonsense people write on sympathy cards. I tried it once. After the funeral. Picked one of her flowers from the pile of pity the neighbors left. I sat there and counted, one petal, two, three, four.. By the time I reached the last one, my fingers were shaking, my palms were full of pieces, and nothing had changed. The sadness was still there. That flower didn’t take anything away it just gave me another reason to hate them.

Now, every time I see one, I feel it again that twist in my chest. I hate how they look at you, how they stand there pretending to be gentle. They’re useless. Pointless. They die for attention. They exist to make people feel better about pain they’ll never fix.
People give them when they don’t know what else to say, when they’re guilty. When they’re lying. Flowers are like apologies that wilt before you can believe them. I’ve seen people cry over flowers. Smile over them. Hold them like they matter.
But to me, they’ll always smell like the day I learned I wasn’t enough.
That’s all they are beautiful reminders of things that die, no matter how much you water them.

So yes, I hate flowers.
I hate how soft they are. I hate how easily they break. I hate that everyone forgives them for it.
Because if I broke as easily as they do, no one would call it beautiful.

Ahmed