Orchid petals. Everywhere. Orchid petals, leaving nothing but the naked stamen atop dying stalks of burnt and curling fiber, strewn lightly and falling. Gather them with wizened hands, and place them in the mouths of the young so that they might taste the bitterness of the past.
The thing about an orchid is the time. As one petal falls, one breeder’s hopes fall down in an idea of useless time. – perfection -- Brief lives in glass cages, aborted. With one petal disintegrated or carelessly plucked away, all dreams of the future are lost.
Aren’t we sometimes all the more beautiful for all the ways we have been destroyed?
Orchid petals. They’re not really something you tend to hear about. A rose is a rose, beautiful and whole, but mangled and scattered it gains its own different meanings. The intensity of its color and the softness of its texture linger like the pieces of the heart we give away. An orchid is a whole. An orchid is a person.
Amazing how one black orchid, a feat of chemicals and not necessarily of desire can steal the show from some thirty or forty others that have been so painfully arranged and raised in what might be a harder harmony to cultivate.
We fly them from Hawaii to Manhattan. Orchids. Showpieces and misguided dreams.
Orchid petals. Everywhere. I see them floating in my mind walking through aisles of displays and arrangements. I am wandering through a show about wholeness and beauty, and I see myself like the wind, blowing lightly on the pristine bulk that surrounds me and watching color radiate through the air, touched on by filtering light from an open roof.
(Fly away.)
I see everything falling apart.
I see so many broken people coalescing in strange and beautiful ways, and want to tear them all apart and have their shattered remnants mingle in ways that let them forget they are open wounds, exposed and unattractive. I want to watch them filter down and forget why perfection was so much of a dream in the first place.
Orchid petals.
I want to catch them on a breath, and swoon.