#hopeless romantics

Fresh Cut Flowers

That’s what he’d likened her to, and she was sure that he had meant it as a compliment, something about beauty preserved in the moment. No, that was overthinking it too much. Just that she was naturally pretty. That was all it was. 

But it wasn’t just that, was it? Why not flowers in the field, where they should be? Was she displaced, taken from her habitat by some callous romantic, snipped and carried around for half an hour on the tube, before thrust into some uncaring girl’s hand? Would she wilt on the sideboard, until she was thrown out of the window with all the carefree thoughtlessness of the young in love?

Or maybe he was instead evoking her timeless beauty, that she should be preserved, kept in that exact moment, looking exactly that way. Only she wouldn’t, would she? She’d wilt, like all people wilt, and she would never be this girl, in this moment, again. His smile would come a little less easily, and the compliment would come to the tip of his tongue and no further, a diver too cowardly to make the jump. He’d swallow it, and she’d go without hearing the pretty words that came out of his lovely mind.

He had grossly overestimated her ability to find a thread and pull, until she was surrounded with nothing but ruins. At least she wasn’t half stupid enough to voice a single one of those thoughts. 

At least she was smart enough to just smile, mutter a breathless ‘thank you’ and kiss him on the cheek. He’d said her eyes were gorgeous, once, like the sea at night, and she’d thought that was awfully sad, too. 

But that one was a beautiful kind of sad. Which was her favourite.