Juxtapose

Contrary to what some might believe, I attempt to keep the mush level to a minimum on here. I talk about a lot of feelings, observations, but when it comes to romance, etcetera, unfortunately for my nice, southern, uber-romantic boyfriend, I'm the one always slapping away handholding in public. Handholding especially, as an example, is especially fun for me because he puts on an exasperated look, sighs and rolls his eyes, and says, ?But I only see you for, like, a week every six months!? This is, like I said, a fun pastime for me.

Maybe it's my stuffy New England upbringing that is shoving its Puritanical fingers into my brain, because, though I don't deny being a diehard romantic in the sense that I spent much of my teen years writing grandiose commentaries on love, life, and relationships, when it actually comes to me having a romantic relationship, I get all nervous. I worry about sounding like I'm not well-grounded and that I'm carried away by the throes of emotion. I worry about people at church thinking we're sitting too close. I worry about people hating my guts. But most of all, I worry about making my single friends feel weird. I worry that I might somehow, in my own little world, end up making one of my single friends jealous or feel awkward. I know that's immensely self-inflating in that it makes me sound like I have about twenty times the impact on the world than I actually do as my small little self, but still. For someone who doesn't worry enough about what are probably extremely important things, I make up for it by worrying about the minuscule details. I'm a worrier. I worry. (?I'm a sailor! I sail! Ahoy!!!?)

I would like to put my worrying aside for a moment. Even though it took me two paragraphs of disclaimer to get to this point, I'm just gonna go in for the kill.

Mark has this thing about giving me flowers. He gives me pink silk rose type things. I don't know my flowers very well, so I assume they're roses. The story behind me getting silk flowers is rather long and somewhat complicated and sometimes doesn't even make sense to me completely, so I won't bother boring anyone with the details. I get them in the mail every so often along with whatever funny little things he finds to send to me, and to a girl who still has great difficulty choosing the right present to give to even her best of friends (and they can all attest to this), getting presents in the mail that are perfect, small, and sweet EVERY TIME is pretty impressive. For the incredible deficit I have in the gift-giving capacity of my life, M makes up for it by always getting the right thing. It's an art. Sar has it too. She always gives The Perfect Gift and I always end up getting her something crappy for Christmas. You know. The stuffed puppy dog doll or some colored silly putty or something. That sort of thing.

But I digress. I've been getting silk flowers in my mailbox since December, since before we were dating, since before I told him to forget-about-dating-me-because-I'm-a-non-dater-and-so-I-won't-date, or whatever it was that I said. Along the way, I've become rather attached to those flowers. They're hanging around in my car, in my bedroom, and in my desk drawers, and I've become accustomed to seeing them there.

Back on Labor Day weekend, my family and Mark and I all went to the Sportsmen's Club and hung around there for the day. Mark somehow found a real yellow rose on the ground, cut right below the bud, a remnant from a wedding that had taken place there the day before, and he gave it to me. I laughed because it was the first real flower he had given to me and it was still just a rose blossom with no stem whatsoever. A little while later he was on the outskirts of the woods and found a wilty, chopped off impatiens. No roots remained on it, and it had probably been broken off while in the flower bed and thrown into the woods to get it out of the way. Mark put the rose and the little wilty impatiens in a plastic cup, filled it with water, and gave it to me. I brought it home, set it on my windowsill, smiled, and within a few weeks had mostly forgotten it.
I have what I like to refer to as a ?Black Thumb? some people have green, and their thumb carries along their gardens as they blossom and bloom into something out of a Jane Austen novel, but my thumb tends to turn things black. A couple of years ago, Sar got me this little bamboo plant. It was supposed to be pretty hardy and we named it Plahnt and felt sure even I couldn't kill it. All you have to do is refill its water and it grows right in the water and little pebbles are around the shoots to hold them upright. It's that simple. Nevertheless, within two weeks of receiving it, it had started to turn brown at the tips of its leaves and to wilt a bit. Who knew bamboo could wilt? Somehow I managed to nurse it back to health but I always keep a wary eye on it.

When it comes to my little cup of impatiens and rose, however, along the way, somehow, it managed to grow and make a home in my little plastic cup. The rose itself went black and turned to mush in the bottom of the cup, but Impatiens seems to have thrived off of it, because now instead of the original two flowers, he has four. About a week ago, he was looking a little low on water and started to look rather decrepit, so I filled him back up and hoped for the best. Again, I forgot about him for a week. So it was with a smile that I opened my curtains this morning to a clear blue sky, a welcome sight after a weekend of rain and dreary grey, and rediscovered my little impatiens plant in its cup, its flowers open and its green glossy, welcoming me to the day.

And I thought about my homework due tomorrow, and my final for pediatrics on Thursday, and about maybe trying not to fail microbiology, and about all the studying I have to do today, and then about my little impatiens plant. And I thought about how, today, it will probably be a really good day.