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Dead Flowers

As the water evaporates from the vase, the air around me becomes polluted by what they once were. 

Water full of life. 

I am breathing in the life of a dead flower. 

Petals drooping into the grains of my bedside table, colors fading into a demented scheme that you never thought could have possibly looked beautiful at an earlier time. 

They are now delicate, shattering as my fingers graze the surface of their flesh.

They now reek of death, they are souring the air. 

And I just leave them there, too lazy to discard of them, wishing they could retreat to the days they were lively and uplifting. 

"Why are you this way?" 

Oh, how ignorant a question to come from the one who parted them from their source of life, who cut their time alive into a fraction and forced them to simply survive instead of thriving. 

"Why are you this way?" I can hear them counter. "Why have you done this to us?" 

And in a way, the way I am sitting here thinking about these flowers and what they, as helpless little souls, have done to me...

well, that's congruent with how the world behaves. 

Our air is polluted by what our friends, our loved ones, our enemies once were. 

We are breathing it all in, we are marking it as sour. 

They are all delicate, and as we graze our heartless words over the flesh of their hearts, they shatter into pieces before our very eyes. 

Everyone is pointing at them, everyone wishing they would retreat back to the days when they were lively, optimistic, and uplifting. Everyone wants something from them. 

"Why are you this way?" they are asked by the same people who cut them right from their source of thriving. 

Now they're only surviving. 

Day-by-day. Minute-by-minute. Heartbeat-by-heartbeat. 

And now I ask...

"Why are you this way?"

"Why are you who you are?"

"Why do you do these things that you do?"

"Who are you to ask them why they are the way they are?" 

We are all quite broken, tiny pieces trying to make up the whole picture. 

Don't prevent them from being their part of the puzzle,

when they never questioned which part of it all you were.