Day 27: Bouquet; Sending Flowers (originally written 10/30/2014)

Sending Flowers

I am sending you flowers.
Sending you flowers after,
I could not send them before.
You will not receive them
of this I am sure.  

Your friends will see them
and know your memory is 

held in the heart of some faceless
entity on the other side of the county.

Almost 20 years ago I forgave you.
Spiteful, Frustrated, Scared

I let it all go. 

And yet I did not act on it, this forgiveness; 

I didn't want to give you the opportunity to strike again.

See, if I still had hard feelings about my college years, 

I could not scroll page upon page of ProFlowers.com:
Sympathy arrangements, Funeral bouquets, Casket inserts.
I could not have rallied the family to assist me
contributing to this symbolic gesture of closure.


I question my own need for forgiveness.

I curse my emerging adult-self for giving up, 

Was it self protection, alienation, discomfort? 

You were strange!
You thought I was too.

When I was a young teenager you actually referred to me as a "strange bird". 

Perhaps it was a compliment allowing the translation may have been a bit  askew. 

Could strange have meant rare, unique or even oddly charming?

Are birds a symbol of something beautiful in France?

All I could think of was Beaky Becky from the Garbage Pail kids trading card series:

A lurching vulture-like creature
I doubt you ever saw it. 

Ever the critic under the pretense of helping,

or maybe your apparent disdain was legitimate.

The complex truth is found somewhere in the murky middle. 

The time for analyzing the relationship is over.

I will ever only know one side and only one side in part. 

The specifics have blurred.

I'm left only with my scraps of memories:

Dreamlike, inconsistent, non-sequential, snippets of a time when 

I was a different sort of me and
You were part of the journey.