I BUY ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS

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There is a particular kind of person who cannot enjoy a sunset without quietly grieving that it is ending. I think I am that person.

It isn't pessimism. It isn't an inability to feel joy. It is something quieter and more stubborn than that ,a kind of loyalty to permanence that I never chose but have always carried. I love deeply and I love with the silent assumption of forever. Not because I am naive about how things work, but because I genuinely cannot love any other way.

I buy artificial flowers.

I know how that sounds. But real ones, no matter how beautiful, come with a countdown I can feel the moment I bring them home. The petals will soften. The colour will leave. And I will have grown attached to something already in the process of leaving. So I choose the ones that stay. The ones that don't ask me to enjoy them quickly before they're gone.

I think this is how I am with people too.

The fear isn't abandonment exactly. It's something more specific  that I will look at someone and decide, somewhere beneath thought, that they are permanent. That I will let that decision settle into my bones without meaning to. I will get comfortable. I will share the things I keep in quiet corners. I will build them into the architecture of my ordinary days. And then one day, without ceremony, they will simply grow out of it. Out of me. And leave.

While I remain  unchanged in my feeling. Lingering in something they have already moved on from.

That is the particular shape of my fear. Not that people leave ... people leave, that is just life doing what life does. But that I will still be there, at the place we used to meet, long after they have found somewhere else to be.

I have watched it happen enough times to know this is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition dressed in feeling.

And yet.

I don't know how to want things less. I don't know how to dip a toe when my nature is to go all the way in or stay on the shore entirely. I don't know how to enjoy something beautiful while holding it loosely. The looseness feels like a kind of dishonesty to me , like pretending I don't feel what I feel just to protect myself from the feeling.

So I stand at the edge of things wanting, hesitating. Doing the mathematics of loss before the thing has even fully arrived.

Maybe this is what it means to be someone who is always about forever  even the small things ,even the flowers. Even the people who wander in wearing the easy confidence of someone just passing through, not knowing that to someone like me, there is no such thing as just passing through.

There is only staying. Or leaving.

And I am always, always the one who stays.

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