GIFTS
They were field flowers, blue and white, swimming past you as you stared out the dusty, oily window of the train bearing you northward, their tiny heads bending in unison, waves of fragile things that didn’t smell like flowers were supposed to. These smelled like grass and tiny green stalks, and you always felt a little guilty giving them to your mom as a gift, as if you were somehow cheating her. But you liked looking at them, huddling in the mason jar you fashioned into a vase, because you weren’t tall enough to reach the place where real vases were kept.
There was something cheerful about the way they held their heads up, even if there was no sun for them to stretch toward. You didn’t know then that your mother overheard you speaking to them at night and that she always replaced them for you, so you never got to watch them die.
That was before you discovered that lightning bugs made for better company for those alone nights when you were too restless to sleep and you weren’t allowed to turn the lights on, so you couldn’t read.
You were restless because it was summer and you could smell night blooming jasmine and lilacs and magnolias, and you could hear the cicadas calling out to their mates in all the trees, and sometimes, you could hear the waves wash ashore from the black Black sea and you didn’t want to close your eyes because you were afraid you’d miss something light and airy and life-changing. A shy glance from a boy you hoped to like some day, an accidental butterfly soft brush of his fingers against your arm…
You can picture the two of you floating over the fields and fields of tiny flowers, afraid to step on them, afraid to ruin this moment more than you’d ever been afraid of anything before. And you don’t take the hand he offers you, because you don’t trust your fingers not to shake or turn limp, and wet, and cold–a tail of a lizard.
You watch the frantic flickers of green from the dozen or so lightning bugs now living in your mason jar, and you hope you are not yet too old, too old, too old to give your momma flowers that smell like grass, and butterflies. And the first kiss.