:: Exigency ::

I was stoic as I examined the consequence of Valentines, spread like dead bodies on my desk. The roses are begining to curl at the tips. The lilies have lost their lustre. The sunflowers had sparkled with vivacity when they arrived―now they are heavy with death. Even the ferns are drooping with patient exhaustion, waiting―quietly, wantonly―to die.

Flowers are beautiful things; they are the fortunate accidents of nature, and when they bloom, they surge to life with an inconscient, but purposeful, blindness. How they bloom, and then, how they die. The only blueprint nature follows is the inevitability of death―even life seems like an accident sometimes, a collision of fatality, a slipup of kismet, a Hamish haze of mortal luck.

'You're so morbid,' my intern declared, hands on her hips, after hearing my random comment on the uselessness of life when it comes in a bouquet, ribboned and regnant.
I smiled unapologetically.
'And you're so...bitter,' she continued.

I thought of Nietzche. It's not just my task to make the individual uncomfortable, it seems. It's my bloody nature.

'I just―don't like flowers. It's a nice idea, but.' It was twenty minutes to ten. I ached for another expresso, a book in bed, and a way out of pseudo-philosophy.

RT continued to look baffled, slighted, even. 'But what? Oh I know―you don't like the men behind them,' she said in a sing-song voice.

My head ached. I mumbled feebly about needing a painkiller, and she burst out, suddenly and in girlish fervor, 'An aspirin a day helps the roses stay!'

That line. It's from that sappy Hong Kong movie, isn't it―City of Glass. We watched it together, and I cried with brisk sentiment as Leon Lai swept Shu Qi into his arms and they kissed with hungry passion in the driving November rain. I wasn't crying because the screen lovers were reunited after their first brush of love had died an icy, adult death. I was crying because I was late. And I was scared.

***

Long ago, I asked: 'Is love a many splendoured thing?'

And he looked at me with tender exasperation, before answering: 'Sometimes you are fool for love, and sometimes you love a fool.'

Not quite the accurate quote, I don't think, but its purpose is dutifully understood.