The first time you decide to buy a vase you will know you have a home to bring it toYou’ll buy it on the promise of fresh cut flowers and embracing summer daysYou’ll buy it knowing the lilac bush outfront will eventually hand you a harvest of the sweetest smelling petalsYou will buy it with the promise of an abundance of tomorrows
My mother grew up never living anywhere long enough to call it homeLiving with only the items necessary to survive the weekyou can not have a vase if you do not have a home, if you do not have the flowers to put in itWithout a home and without flowers a vase just becomes another reminder of how empty everything is
When my momma crafted a home of her own she had a vase in every roomShe even had two in the kitchen and they were always full of flowersShe’d leave one in my room so the scent of lilacs floated through the air whisperingthere is no place like homeI used to love vases because they promised flowersand they promised tomorrows
A week after my mother died I sat on the floor of my kitchen using the cold that had long since settled into my home as myonly companionExcept for the vasesAround 30 of them covered every surface of the roomthe flowers no longer smelling like my home because my home died a week ago—no.They smell like the funeral home where everyone my mom ever knew used me as her substitute to say goodbye, because I am the closest thing to her they will ever get
Weeks later the flowers died.So I strung them on the walls and turned that house—our homeinto a graveyardI hid the vases away, unable to look at anything as empty as meUnable to look at my symbol of a tomorrow that she won’t be in
Months later when the spring settled in and the sun made its return I boarded up the windowsI drew every shade, unable to look at my mom’s favorite flowersunable to smell a home I have long since lost
And when I walked in my room to find a small vase with purple flowersit felt like the world was implodingLike being surrounded by an ocean of joy and innocence that no longer belongs to youUpon a closer inspection I saw the uneven stems and too soon picked petals and I knew my father had put them thereAnd in that moment I hated myself for tucking him away with all of the vasesbecause selfishly I couldn’t look at him without cryingSo I hid him in the corner of my mind that used to be my home
It has been two years now—two long yearsBut I have finally learned to open up the windows and let the smell of lilacs embrace me like my mother once didI’ve learned to no longer shy away from my fathers hugs, because like the vases under our cabinets, we may be empty, but at least we have each other
The other day I finally emptied our cupboards of all of the vasesAs I was packing them away one slipped out of my grasp and shatteredand that sound released a breath I didn’t know I was holdingSo I broke another, and another, and anothereach shatter releasing me from the only future I ever wantedone with her in it
Those funeral vases filled with so much emptiness were banished from my worldIn the end I was left with only my momma’s old vasesI kept those though.I put one in every room and filled them with flowersI filled them with lifeI got rid of the bouquet corpses on our wallsand when spring finally cameI opened the windows.
Photo by Battlecreek Coffee Roasters on Unsplash