Lavender
Lavender has always been my favourite flower. My favourite scent. My favourite colour. When I was a child I would pick and pluck the stems on the way to school. Rubbing it in my palms and stuffing the crumbs in my pocket to play with when I was bored of chewing my gums or plaiting my hair.
Lavender is the beaten, worn pavement and the sun cream smeared school uniform of summer. The gingham print amongst green grass and blistering monkey bars.
Lavender has always been my favourite flower. For my thirteenth birthday my auntie gave me a lavender perfume. It would sit on the shelf as I would savour it for every 'special occasion' — (special occasion being a boy/girl party at the local park), Spraying it on my wrists and neck and hair and stomach and thighs as every pre-teen girl does.
Lavender is the girls I grew with, the eyeshadow stained fingertips, the sugary sweetness of strawberry laces and secrets slipping into eager ears at sleepovers.
Lavender has always been my favourite flower. When I was seventeen I recall tipsily looking up and deciding that the lavender sky, dusky and desperate to be indigo, was in fact my favourite colour in the whole world.
Lavender is the thrilling epiphany of insignificance. The fading summer sunset, cheap white wine, dizzy nights which were infinite of kisses and dancing and the burning laughter of never growing up.
Lavender has always been my favourite flower. When you left me I couldn't sleep. My mother drowned me in lavender essential oils to rid my insomnia.
The other day I walked past a lavender bush. The smell hit me like a high, infusing itself into my bloodstream and rushing to my temple. Yet I did not picture the summer days of monkey bars or the indigo wine dizzy skies. Instead, it was the smell of my heartbroken corpse convulsing in twisted sheets drenched in lavender. It was the smell of old sex and my abandoned body. Blurred boundaries of skin and sin and lucid hope. My acid tears reacting with the potent oils and staining the bed you left me to rest in. A pitiful attempt to mask the decay.
Roses have always been my favourite flower. Yes. Roses will do.