I awoke when the sun rose. My body was sore, my cheek textured with the imprint of the forest. I'd slept six hours, maybe seven. Pushing up into a sitting position, I adjusted myself away from the two circular puddles under the heath.
The city was waking up. Engines sputtered in to life, brakes screeched, birds sang. On the street below me, a school-age girl stepped off a bus. She was alone and walked quickly down the street, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. I couldn't see what she carried.
I exhaled. I wanted more than anything to be that girl, to be a child again and carry crocus or hawthorn or larkspur instead of buckets of thistle. I wanted to search the North Bay until I found Elizabeth, and apologize, and beg forgiveness. I wanted to start my life over, on a course that would not lead to this moment, this waking up alone in a city park, my own daughter alone in an empty apartment building. Every decision I'd ever made had led me here, and I wanted to take it all back, the hatred and the blame and the violence. I wanted to have lunch with my angry ten-year-old self, to warn her of this morning and give her the flowers to point her in a different direction.
But I couldn't go back. There was only now: this forest within the city and my own daughter, waiting. The thought filled me with dread. I did not know what I would find when I returned to the apartment. I did not know if she still screamed, or if time, solitude, and hunger would had collapsed my daughter's lungs completely as a rising tide.
I failed my daughter. Less than three weeks after giving birth and making promises to us both, I had failed, and failed again. The cycle would continue. Promises and failures, mothers and daughters, indefinitely.
The Language of Flowers, P316~317
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
ISBN 978-1-4472-0882-2
