I. Daliance

You are the perfect flower. Anyhow, you are advertised as a flower. Sweetest when first plucked. On the hinge of death you are most alive.

The allure of your loveliness makes all of our hearts heart leap with desire. We want to pluck YOU, possess YOU, crush YOU with our beauty-lust. An ecstatic, pounding YES!YES!YES! kicking and screaming with uncontrollable rapture… until we realize what we’ve done.

but wait just a minute. WAIT.

NO!

STOP! (Then a brief, uncomfortable silence.)

I think it is too late to hope for something else. You wilt beneath the footfalls of our own thrusting obsession.

The gardens of the fallible are no place for hope.

A lily no more, we have dampened and darkened your radiant plumage with our sweat and heaving. Our passion for your beauty too eagerly pursued, possessed, and then thrown away, too quickly.

We’re oh-so-sorry to say that now, you lie unconsidered in the wake of our pursuit of the next flower, plucked, thrown in a vase, waiting for its own inevitable demise.

Next, please.

II. Reconsideration

Not surprisingly, YOU, this very real, all-too-real, flesh and blood object of our desire, quickly wither and die. Now there’s no body to betray your eternal elegance. All that’s left is the imagined YOU. The one we’ve canonized. The YOU of our residual collective fantasy.

Oh sure we say that we wish we’d have been more careful. We cried out, what have we DONE to you?! Yes, we all thought we’d planned so carefully. We thought we’d figured that one out. We console ourselves with such utter nonsense. The tears of heaven flow away from our empty hearts.

We tell ourselves that the hunted do not consider the Greater Plan. Yes of course. They line up like Redcoats and fall silently, accepting their immutable fate. But that wasn’t supposed to happen to YOU. No, YOU were supposed to be different.

Sorrowful flower, do not weep for those of us who do not understand. We who are scornful and insensitive are the first to pluck, the first to grab. The last to notice.

III. Oscar, Don’t Drop the Vase

The other flowers cannot bear your beauty. You must hide from their wrath. You are the inspiration for their jealous rage. You must hide from the screams of the Hunters bearing down. So run. Run as fast as you can. Run.