CNF: The Flower Pot
by Caroline Firme
Three months ago, in the spring, I was close to suicide. Texas was awash with the medley of rich blue, coral, and yellow that brings seasonal joy in the form of wildflowers. It is punishable by brief imprisonment to pick these flowers. In the weeks that were almost my last, I picked ten Texas daisies and put them on my desk in a vase made by my late aunt.
Her vase lingers on my desk still. The silhouette of its right side is an s, asymmetrical. The bottom segment is longer, elongated all the way through, like a winding road with two shallow turns, right then left, if followed up from the terracotta clay base. It shines with the irregularity of a half-eroded river stone: more matte at its bulbous bottom and glossy at its short, tapered top. I cannot decide if the glazed surface is black or dark grey.
The daisies have stems of ochre and olive green, with centers yellow like an old obituary clipped from newspaper, petals crispy and tussled with decay, off-white with an arrestingly grey undertone, an unnerving quality in their color comparable only to the skin of a loved one’s vacated corpse. From where I sit I cannot smell the decay I fear hangs around them like a poltergeist. As long as I don’t move, they are immortal.
When I was in the hospital my mother cleaned my room for me, and I cried on the phone about this kindness. She left the flowers, and I wonder if they were as fossilized then as they are now, whether she would have kept them, if she did so despite their antiquity. Why? Certainly the other spoils of my months long depression were discarded: the tea with mold lily pads and a rich micro ecosystem, the unspeakable tools of self destruction, the tear stained tissues littering the floor, never reaching the trashcan in the powerlessness that rendered me bedridden. I wonder, too, whether my room would have been left as it was if I never made it to the hospital: if my coffee stained carpet would become consecrated ground, the disarray a monument to my illness, and those daisies morbidly beautiful always, outliving me.
I must not touch the flower pot, lest stems snap or petals fall. The only evidence of degradation is a sandlike debris like autumn leaves below the impossibly resilient, if dead, flowers. I must not move the flower pot, my portrait of Dorian Gray. The flower pot is a ghost of a self who gave in, and I dare not break the spell.
Caroline Firme is a 19 year old student of rhetoric and writing at UT Austin. Writing is not only her passion but her way of navigating life: She has filled well over a dozen journals in the last six years. She gave her first poetry reading when she was nine and placed in a poetry competition held by Live Poets Society when she was in high school. Her second publication was a poem in Entropy Magazine about a boy, written when she was 15 and thought she couldn’t possibly be a lesbian. She has since escaped compulsory heterosexuality, and spends her time taking notes on movies, going down Wikipedia holes, obsessively listening to Animal Collective, and dabbling in tuner culture.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Poster”? “Flower Pot” is weird because I wrote it 3 years ago as a college essay, but I realized it was too morose and metaphorical. It was about the way in which a traumatic act (committed by the boy I wrote my first published work about) tanked my mental health and GPA by plunging me into one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. It was originally an examination of the way depression bodily disables you and renders you unable to maintain basic hygiene and cleanliness. It was supposed to indict my own neglect for my mental health, but I couldn’t make the connections. I knew what I wanted to say, but the piece didn’t say it properly. I liked the prose, but a lot of it was a rambling mess, and I didn’t want to seem unstable by mentioning suicide, so I hid it away out of shame. I didn’t rediscover it until I made a little book of poems for my best friend fairly recently. I started editing it into something I ended up being really proud of. I like the editing more than I like the writing, most of the time. The hardest part is banging out a garbage rough draft, but the rest is my favorite thing in the world. I like fixing things. Now, “The Flower Pot” feels hopeful. That chapter of my life is over, and I still have reminders, but I’ve recovered from my PTSD and I don’t feel as fragile anymore. I no longer feel like I could fall back into that abyss. The piece is sort of its own flower pot.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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