Once with Blue: Language of Flowers

Daffodils are blooming,
at least in ceramic pots outside the plant nurseries.

"Daffodils," Blue once told me, "symbolize new beginnings."
But you must never give someone a single blossom, she said,
because they foreshadow unrequited love.

She stole a bundle of wilted daffodils from her florist job once,  six or so years back.
"It wasn't really stealing," she reasoned, "they dubbed the flowers 'unsuitable' for the storefront."

She stuck them in a clear bottle and added food coloring to their water.
"For contrast," she said, adding. "they're dying and won't suck up much of the blue anyway."
She'd add blue to anything.
She'd add flowers to everything.

Daffodils were always the flower Kelsey asked me to mail her from the Carolinas.
I would find some on Proflowers,
but in hindsight, I should've added food coloring packets as well, for contrast.

Daffodils or peonies, she'd say she favored.
Or tiger lilies or orchids or night-blooming cereus, depending on her mood.

She always sent me flowers.
On valentines day, the first year we weren't able to bake cupcakes and plaster our faces with chocolate morsels, she sent me tulips.
"I know you hate roses," she wrote in the attached note.
Blue insisted I never settle for roses, or anything else I didn't truly fit the norm for.
She had opinions and stuck to them, embracing them
She always remembered things.
I always forgot them.
That's why she was the one to tell all of our stories.

(Which is why I sometimes daydream that she left behind all the written accounts,
detailed more delicately than my belated, blotchy remembrance.)

Yet I still recall:

Peonies she fancied for they were the fuller, cooler, more sophisticated sister of the ordinary rose.
Then cereus she adored for their rare blossoms, only open for a single full moon.
Her mother once gathered us the night the cereus finally let free its petals.
"This is a special species," she would say, "a desert flower."
Blue and her mother, Amy, had green thumbs.
They taught me the language of flowers.
They taught me many languages,
but Kelsey Blue especially,
showed me how to
blossom from my
own type of
bud.