I’ve cut flowers for you, which means time is running out. These flowers. Soon they will die. For nothing if I don’t give them to you. I may even resent you for that. It’s not just flowers to demonstrate my appetite for your attention but a factory of packaging instruments turning all my sentiments, first into some sexy grocery store pre-mix thrice-washed salad, and then eventually into feed or compost, because time’s running out on the harvest, too. This whole metaphor is a big joke to you. The world we inhabit is shockingly unsympathetic to sentiment. You laugh at me.

Nonetheless.

I have plucked the flowers for you and sometimes that is what is meant to happen to a flower. I can’t think of anything more unusual and exquisite than a planned seizure of blooms that could have been reserved for god instead.

I suppose it is the price of faith that the flowers must die, never having reached you. We must believe, and nothing else. Neither identify the impulse for why we become faithful, nor acquiesce to the reticence of our higher intelligence begging us to stop following what gives us no evidence of a possible barter. The grainery is beautiful, empty or full. I do not have a good enough sense of humor to continue feeding a god who yields so little.

My father and I recently went through a traumatic event that rustled up old memories, and I could feel his humiliation as we pieced together the plot to scam us. I never want to face that version of my father again. Strangely, there was nothing satisfying about seeing a person who’d hurt my feelings, be hurt himself. The hardest thing about accepting my father is not that he’d been faulty, but that he will never know about the silos full of rotten blooms I’d kept for so long as a hopeful person awaiting his return. Perhaps the humiliation is mutual.

But the flowers I’ve plucked for you are going to die if I don’t hand them to you soon and I don’t believe in potpourri because dried flowers are pathetic, and you don’t have any room in your world for sympathy and I have no storage space left in my silos for any more controlled outcomes. What price faith.