lilypads
in middle school, i was obsessed with birthstones. mine’s a ruby. i was also obsessed with birth-flowers (water-lily and larkspur) and pretty much anything that was marketed as being inherent to me. i still love this concept, but now i think i understand why. there’s something safe about being told, “hey, by no fault or effort of your own, here is something about you.” it’s a welcomed relief from the pressure of having to try to be something. i didn’t choose when i was born, i didn’t try to be a ruby or a larkspur or a water lily or a cancer sun (or a libra moon and pisces rising.) but i still get to be those things. these are things which matter very little in the grand scheme of life, but they’re still mine. all this to say, i place a lot of stock in silly coincidental things like flower symbolism.
outside the Cape Cod Museum of Art, the place i’ve been labouring away (unpaid) all summer, there’s a small koi pond. it’s surrounded by daylilies and hydrangeas, filled to the brim with gleaming fish and lily pads. since my first day, i’ve been stopping in front of the pond to see which buds decided to bloom on each day. i got to watch them opening in the morning and closing in the afternoon, and i’ll be the first to admit i got a little attached to them. i took a picture of the bloom that opened on my birthday, and some small part of me thought that maybe this particular bud was mine. i was a small amount of audacity short of reaching in and grabbing it off the vine. today, on my last day, the bloom looked more like it was closing than opening. i took it as a “goodbye, friend.”
i wonder if enough patrons stop to admire those flowers. if the flowers that bloom under the taller pads, half hidden from the sun and wandering eyes, were ever spared a curious glance beside mine. i hope they were. i hope they felt beautiful, felt celebrated. in my head, i used to tell those flowers i was proud of them for finding the strength to open and close all in one day. to open proudly, to bloom in spite of the distracted eyes that never quite found or appreciated them. i hope that todays flower, in it’s half-opened state, wasn’t mourning the loss of my loving and pride-filled gaze. i hope some other wide-eyed and curious intern will be proud of those water-lilies.
