Love is a Bouquet of Flowers

At sixteen, they were playmates. They looked alike, and ran around town pulling pranks and acquiring a slow realization that they had a childlike curiosity for each other's bodies. Childishly they acknowledged this, and childishly they stayed a safe distance from their fears. They threw each other parties, did each other's homework, and skipped class. Peter and Moriah shared a devotion that can come only from the utter acceptance of a sibling-like bond, but when, after two years, Moriah asked if Peter would buy her some flowers they walked by on the street one day and he refused, she knew it was over. Still, though, in their twenties, they laugh at the same jokes and wrestle and call each other family.

Next it was Louis, who was set in his ways. Moriah relied upon him to be there - to be company for grocery shopping, to buy the beer for the party, to be on her arm when she wanted nothing to do with anyone else in the room. They did just that, rely, and in their fading adolescence they named that love. This love, too, they relied upon to carry them through school, but their passions rested at opposing ends of the intellectual spectrum and the steadiness they relied upon in each other could not catalyze their interests. After years of lavish gifts Louis forgot roses on Valentines Day. Moriah re-scheduled dinner. He arrived late, and forgot the roses again.

Sean was a lost cause, a wild thief who in his neediness and fear stole Moriah's heart. Their tryst was relatively brief but encapsulated all of the passion that was absent with Louis, plus some. Impractical, destructive, an exciting grasp at a reality that existed only in their romantic literature, they read French poetry and stayed up drinking bourbon and smoking cigarettes, scandalizing their small college and tearing holes in themselves. When Moriah woke up from an illness he had sat with her during, she knew he would never buy her flowers. It wasn't until Sean woke her from sleep to tell her he was afraid and leaving, that she knew she needed them.

This morning Moriah woke up with a scream at her alarm clock, shaking. James held her, assuring her he was there and had a hold of her, nothing would happen. As she drove to work she realized that it was not, in fact, a startling from the alarm that had scared her that morning, but the inevitable leaving of the bed she shared, the long hours away from James that had terrified her. At breakfast she thought of the farmer's market that past week, the one he asked to go to, that they walked through in the rain. She had passed a stall full of giant stemmed flowers and showed him an oversized bouquet of white petals. He asked if she wanted some. Startled, she turned to him and responded that no, she did not, he had just given her all she needed by asking.