The scent of flowers🥀

She comes to me sometimes,
mostly on the nights I throw my little fit and sleep outside on the grass in my sleeping bag.
I close my eyes and take deep breaths and remember the scent,
deep breath and then that scent; like some sort of flower with vanilla extract.

I hear her feet in the tall grass, her footsteps both gentle and fast.
She climbs in next to me in my zipped-up sleeping bag.
I am huddled in the corner, so that she has plenty of room.

" How are you, John?"
She leans in and whispers in my ear.
With the scent of flowers.
Flowers, like the ones I used to steal from my mother's flower bed.

I would run outside and eat the petals off of them as fast as I could, so that I wouldn't stop myself.
because I knew how much it upsets her,
but the taste and silky feel it left on my tongue made it too tempting.

"John... john? well, aren't you going to kiss me John?"
She asks in her childish pout.

' No, Mary, just leave me. Please.'

She lays her head on my chest, but I can't feel anything.
I focus on the smell of flowers.

'Mary, do you remember those nights in my room, how you let me in, how you told me,
can we go back to then?'

I fell in love with your words before my fingers ever traced an inch of you.


" Touch me John, please?"

' I can't, Mary, you won't be there.'

I close my eyes and focuse on the smell of flowers
and imagine myself sinking in the ground, sinking six feet down.
And I wonder what it would be like to be there for eternity, eternity, just you and me.



" Do you still love me, John?"

'Go away, please Mary!'

" Touch me John, and let me go."

' No, I don't want to let you go. I just want you to leave. I want to be alone. You know that when I reach for you, and you're not there, you'll disappear.

" We all disappear John.
We are born and then we are gone.
Just like the night light that flickers off and then on."


' But I need you Mary, you know this, you know that I can't stand to be here alone.
I won't let you go and be on my own again. You were the voice that I spent my days listening to even when everybody was laughing at me. It was you who I couldn't stand to leave me. But you did leave me, Mary!'


" Oh, you are such a little boy John. Touch me?"

I am a boy, I am a boy, I am a...

My fingers twitch at my side and she is gone.