flowers are dying, but so are you.

I think about flowers often. They are the safest thing to give someone, and for all the right reasons. When the lifeline of something is short-lived, its indispensability rises. You never look at it the same way again.

Flowers are perhaps the most beautiful countdowns we willingly purchase. You know their timeline is unarguably short, and yet they are adored in any setting. Or maybe they are adored because of it.

The intrinsic value has little to do with the emotional one. A red rose from a street vendor could evoke the same amazement as one from a premium florist. Its worth leans more on the thought behind it than the price attached to it. And while you know it’s going to die, you savour every ounce of it. You keep it in water to let it breathe, not as a ventilator, but as an aggregator of life. The more you water it, the more it blooms. Not in hopes of keeping it forever, but in honour of its presence.

It is mindfulness disguised as décor. Meditation in petals. Every glance either reminds you of the giver or lets you dissolve into its colour for a nanosecond.

From birthdays to funerals, it is this very dichotomy that makes flowers sacred.

I once asked a florist what it felt like to protect something they already knew was going to die. They laughed (not cruelly, just factually). “If flowers didn’t die, I wouldn’t have a business. Their ending is my beginning, in a way.”

And that was it. That is where the poetry ended.

Death, as a business model.

Entire economies bloom on expiry dates. Candles, cakes, seasons, trends, youth. We don’t resent their ending. We budget for it. One might call it capitalistic. I, for a fact, never liked flowers, until I did.

Perhaps that’s the irony. We accept endings when they are predictable, but resist them when they are personal.

In the society we live in, rifts don’t just occur over actions, they occur over perspectives. Nobody pauses to consider that their truth could be someone else’s absolute nonsense. The factification of opinions is absurd, yet it thrives.

How else do industries sell permanent roses as gifts for loved ones? It is not hope they sell, it is the refusal of decay, packaged in velvet boxes. And even refusal, businesses have learned, is profitable.

Maybe we never wanted flowers to last forever.

We only wanted the feeling to.

The petals fall. The memory doesn’t.

And we continue buying both.