Decaying Dreams

What's the deal with girls and old, dried out flowers anyway? Ok, ok, I know what you're saying, "Why ask me? You're a girl." Right. Not only am I a girl, I'm a girl who currently has old, dried out bouquets from recent weddings hanging in her hallway, who has innocently slept with rose petals under her pillow in hopes of dreaming of true love, who has kept everything from school yard game dandelions to my first dozen roses from a boy to a pansy plucked from the landscaping of Michael Jordan's front gate on an excursion to help my friend forget, if only for a moment, that his father alit from a bridge into a cloud of his own delusions of failure less than 24 hours earlier. My mom calls me a pack rat--I like to think of myself as sentimental. To me, these dainties represent more than my inability to use a trash receptacle.

They hang daintily from hooks and rods, they lay cradled in bowls and buggies; they appear pressed in the folds of encyclopedias, nestled between Egypt and Ethiopia. In a world of failing minds and decaying dreams they don't merely represent memories-- they are memories: tangible yet untouchable, poignant yet impassive, delicate and yet, enduring.