Daisies
You gave me daisies and I pretended I liked them.
Your smile was cute as you handed them over, the boyish shrug of your shoulders as you pretended the purchase was random.
“I was at the grocery store - saw them on the way to checkout…thought you might like them.”
I’m sure you noticed the awkwardness of my smile, this first crack in my armor one-month into what would only be a three-month thing.
At least we were more than a fling.
It would be me, not you - of course - who ended things. After all, I stumbled at the sight of daisies (and it was too early for honesty).
You were playing by the rules. Nothing too expensive. Nothing too crazy. The random present that was supposed to make me smile.
And I did, but I didn’t at the same time.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said too quickly.
“You don’t like them?”
“No - no, they’re great - really nice. I just, I didn’t expect anything.”
And it was true.
There was at least that honesty. I hadn’t expected anything, most of all daisies. If it had all worked out, maybe I should have seen this moment as a moment of reclamation. But he never bought me daisies. He never bought me anything.
Isn’t it strange how the people who give us nothing often have the most of what we want?
If we had been at that stage where we had already traded stories of exes come and gone, maybe I would have told you the story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even mattered if you had given me daisies. Maybe it would have been sweet, instead of reminding me of something too soon to be forgotten.
Daises fringe the entrance to the campus garden. You probably knew that somewhere subconsciously, probably rode your bike by them and that garden every other day heading to the library or Newman Hall or the gym.
I remember thinking about these flowers as he broke things off. “Things” as if there had been something to start, but we were just the casualty of the casual, the statistic of the status quo. And then the daises existed to contrast it all - bright and filled with perpetual sunshine like only yellow and white open-faced flowers could convey…annoyingly
And there you were, two months later, handing me a bunch of daisies, as if you had swept them up from that garden - as if you were saying, “Here’s that sunshine you wanted.”
“Thank you,” my voice would say eventually to wrap up the moment, its awkwardness fading into a nice date of dinner and a movie.
But it would be too late. The phrase “This was not what I wanted all” had already been heard, even if we tried our best not to listen.
-Charity Tran
