Lighthouse

I hated flowers. I fucking hated flowers.

In school I was always one of the first kids to catch hay fever, come Spring. I would be sneezing endlessly and my eyes would water till I looked like a true sob story. My head would ache continuously and it was an absolute pain to be around people with my pounding head. My mother told me I was always irritated and angry in Spring. By the end of Spring I was back to my usual self, but my dislike for flowers only became stronger every year.

As I grew older, I became less susceptible to hay fever, although Spring still irritated me at times. But I still hated those bloody flowers. What was the big deal? The pungent smell was weird and distasteful, and most of them were ugly anyway. Why did so many women seem to adore flowers? There was absolutely nothing special or remotely positive about flowers.

Imagine the shock I must've faced when I found myself buying roses one rainy day.

When I was nineteen, my friend Matt convinced me to take a bouquet of roses for Adriana when I decided to ask her out. I almost hit him, but I knew Adriana loved flowers and her chances of rejecting me would be minimised if I brought her this gift. It was going to be the start of something beautifully spectacular. I had grudgingly prepared a bouquet that morning, thanking the stars when only a few sneezes escaped me rather than the hundreds I had grown used to in my childhood. I counted exactly nine roses.

The first time I met Piper King, I was carrying a bouquet of roses for the girl I had secretly admired for months. The first time I met Piper King, she was rude, brusque, loud and blunt. I was on my way to catch the bus to Adriana's place when she ran into me. My bouquet had almost fallen to the muddy ground but she had caught them. I gifted her a single rose, and thanked her for saving my bouquet. Instead, Piper insulted me for not moving out of her way in time, which caused her to miss her bus. We waited at the bus stop alone together for another ten minutes before she asked me why I was carrying the flowers. I wanted to tell her that I didn't want this, that I hated flowers, that flowers, and especially roses, were cliche and overused, but I didn't. Rather, I told her that the flowers were going to witness the start of a beautiful relationship soon, which they symbolised.

The first time I met Piper King, we exchanged a few words about relationships. The first time I met Piper, I learned that she wasn't very good at keeping a conversation when she decided to walk away from the bus stop so she would not have to speak to me.
That afternoon, Adriana counted eight roses as she said yes to being my girlfriend.

The second time I met Piper King, I ignored her. I didn't want to speak to a rude woman again. But then she asked me about the frangipani's I was carrying that day and I ended up telling her what they symbolised. This time I learned that Piper King was definitely fond of walking away from people, and I absolutely hated that.

The third time I met Piper King, I was almost sure she had began to wait for me at the bus stop, only to impudently walk away eventually. She told me that she liked the forget me not's I was carrying, and this time she actually stayed, and we talked. The third time I met Piper King, she was friendly, attentive, genuine and affectionate. This time I learned that Piper King was not at all the woman I had made her out to be at first. Piper was something else all together.

That day Piper talked about nothing and everything at once. She was funny, bubbly, weird, and insane. Piper was unlike anyone I had ever known, she was like the astral light of a comet you see in a thousand years. Piper King was the girl you would not forget.

The next day I found myself happily buying a bunch of forget me not's to place in a small vase in my apartment, despite sneezing continuously. Maybe I didn't hate flowers as much as I had first thought.

The first time I kissed Piper King, I knew that preparing the bouquet of roses and deciding to catch the bus due to the rain had been the best decision of my life. Piper King wasn't just someone I could not forget, she was the one I did not want to forget.