I had been helping a friend with their engagement dinner; by the time it broke up it was already night.
I stood alone at the roadside waiting for a car. One happened to pass just then, and a band of moving light slid across its window, catching the reflection of something lit up behind me.
I turned around. It was a flower shop, still open.
Through the plate glass, among all that crowded colour, I saw the familiar outline at once.
The assistant asked what I wanted. Balloon flowers, I said.
She drew out a bunch of unopened buds, wrapped them in paper and handed them over. The stems were as smooth as ever.
The first time I met balloon flowers was like this too. Back then someone pushed them into my hand: white buds, swollen like little purses stuffed with secrets. I held them awkwardly, and the water on the stems wet my fingers. It was the first bunch of flowers I had ever been given. That afternoon sunlight leaked through a gap in the curtains and fell on the buds, the petals shut tight, as if keeping a secret they refused to tell.
Those flowers opened in the end. Every morning I woke and looked at them first. At their best the white was a clean, quiet white, like the faint ring of moonlight along the rim of a porcelain bowl. They bloomed their own way and disturbed no one.
The day they wilted I put the dried petals into a small box. Back then I thought some things would be kept forever. But the days went by and I no longer know where that box ended up. Only the balloon flower stayed. Ever since, I glance at it whenever I pass a flower shop. Sometimes I buy a bunch, stand it in a glass bottle and watch it open slowly, and fade slowly.
It is not habit, really. The flower has grown into my sense of taste. It is like living in one place long enough: your accent changes, your palate changes, even the way you look at people changes. That bunch of white balloon flowers was where the change began.
They say the flower's meaning is “eternal love”.
Flowers open and fade, people come and go. What on earth lasts forever?
The year that bunch wilted, the edges of the petals curled first, the white yellowed and then turned a dead brown, and the lightest touch left crumbs on my fingers. But over time I noticed that some things do remain. Liking plainer flowers, for one. A closeness to white balloon flowers that is almost instinct. And how, whenever I see a fresh batch in a shop, I think of an afternoon when someone pushed a bunch into my hand, so naturally, as if that were simply how flowers were meant to be given.
These small changes are like the flower's seeds: they fall into the soil of a life, take root, sprout, and become part of it.
I put the new white balloon flowers into a glass bottle with water. The buds are still closed and there is no telling when they will open. But I know that they will.
I still like white balloon flowers. It has nothing to do with flower meanings; it lives in my eyes and my fingers. They were handed to me one afternoon, and since then that faint, cool white has taken root and become a base colour of my life that can no longer be peeled away.
