Cut Flowers (longer version)

He brought me roses.

My father used to say that if a man brings a woman cut flowers without an apparent reason, he's cheating on her. How pessimistic I thought back then. How realistic I think now.

The roses were supposed to be an attempt to make amends. I had asked a couple of days earlier what was wrong, why he had distanced himself from me. Instead of an explanation he offered me flowers. I wasn't happy about it but I put them in a vase anyway and left to a festival with him. There was a dozen ways I would have rather spent my Midsummer than in a crowded festival with him, but he begged me to come. I thought maybe experiencing something together would bring us closer again and agreed to go, for our sake.

We set up a tent that was just big enough to fit us both. It was cold and wet outside and stuffy and hot inside the tent. He disappeared as soon as we had the tent ready and I was left plowing the mud among way too many strangers. After a couple of hours I found him standing in a line with a young woman. The woman was small and soft and she had a strikingly long hair. He introduced me to her only by my name, without a title. I stood a couple of steps away, looked at him beaming at her every word and I knew perfectly well what was going on.

I begged him that we would go home but of course he was having a wonderful time and didn't want to leave. We had come on his car so when he disappeared into the crowd again I was very much stuck in there, in the dampness that clung to my bones, among countless happily chattering people who carefully stepped around me.

For two miserable days I only waited for leaving. I saw him in the nights when he came to the tent, slipped into his sleeping bag, and turned his back on me. We met for lunch and for dinner, but I quickly lost my appetite when I looked at his stupid grin and eyes that carefully looked everywhere but at me. When he finally drove me back home I saw the flowers in the vase where I had left them already drooping. I spent the night wondering why would he do this to me. Why did he drag me there when he had clearly agreed to meet with another woman?

It still took him a couple more days before he wrote to me that maybe we should “take a break” because he “needed to think some things through”. Still he wouldn't just break up with me, he would rather drag it on forever. I tried to ask him if he had another woman and is there actually any chance that after this “little break” he’d want to try to make things right with me. He simply didn't answer.

I wished I could have just shaken the douchebag off my mind, but instead I sunk deep into a crippling anxiety and, at times, into the deep blackness of depression. For two weeks I waited to hear from him. I heard he had left the town, and it wasn't hard to guess who he was seeing. When he came back I demanded a clear answer: was he coming back to me or not. Finally he gave me the relief of knowing it was really, truly over. For a couple of days I fantasized about all the ways I could beat him up. The anger felt so much better than the waiting.

Some weeks later he wrote to me, asking if we could still be friends. I asked him if he would first talk with me about what happened. He said something about letting the past be in the past, and I told him that in that case I would prefer to keep him in the past. I never heard from him again. I did once stumble into his fiancée’s writing about how they had met online, agreed to meet at the festival, and how soon after he had travelled to meet her to have a romantic weekend with her.

I wonder if he ever told her who I was. I wonder if that woman with strikingly long hair often gets roses, if she carefully puts them on display and thinks what a romantic gesture it is. If she looks at the flowers when she's carrying a baby and trying to soothe a screaming toddler and wonders why her husband isn't coming home already, while the crippled flowers slowly but inevitably wither away.