Tags
blue orchids, exotic flowers, gardening, gay, hobby, lesbian, letters, long distance relationships, love, love letters, loving yourself, orchids, reassurance, relationships, romance, romantic ideas
Dear Caroline,
Happy Sunday, my love.
I’m sitting on the couch, smelling the pot roast in the crock pot. The weather outside is clear, sunny, and chilly.
I miss you.
Yesterday I repotted several of our orchids since they are done blooming for this year. The new ones. The pretty pale yellow ones with blush colored centers you brought me from Florida. The white one with the purple splotches.
Moving them around and watering them, I saw that yours was sprouting. The blue one I bought you got your birthday almost two years ago.
I know the blue is artificial, but they were so beautiful and exotic, just like you. I wanted you to have them.
I was sitting here, missing you, thinking about them.
Because they are forced to bloom before they are ready, store bought orchids are difficult to rebloom. It hasn’t bloomed since the initial flowers fell away a couple of months after I brought it to you, to put in the apartment bathroom as a reminder that I was there.
I noticed the bloom spike yesterday.
It struck me as a beautiful parallel to our life together.
We were the blue orchids. Beautiful and artificial. People looked at us and if they didn’t know, assumed that what you see is what you get. They assumed we were happy because we had soil, light, warmth, and water. We bloomed because we were forced to, whether we were ready or not. We had been altered, changed to fit a new definition of beauty. To be exotic and surreal. To accentuate our surroundings.
Then I brought you the orchid, like you and I found each other. We bloomed for a time in the constraints of our surroundings.
Things changed. Once the orchid had finished blooming, I uprooted it, trimmed its roots, the dying, decaying parts that no one saw. It was transplanted into fresh, appropriate growing medium. You set off to Puerto Rico. Then to Orlando. I watered the orchid and have spent hours texting you, long phone calls missing you.
Uprooting the orchid, trimming the decay, putting it in a fresh environment may have been painful for the orchid, the way being separated is for us.
But it’s thriving now. After almost two years, she’s getting ready to reward our hard work with new, beautiful blooms. Just like us. My bloom is sparkly and always on my finger, a constant reminder of the depth of your love for me.
She’ll no longer bloom blue, something most people might not find as entrancing, but she’ll bloom her natural, creamy white. She’ll never be forced to bloom out of season or be something she’s not. She’ll never be forced to fit into a pot that’s too small or doesn’t fit just right.
People who look at her now will never know how hard the transition was or what she went through to be where she is. But she will always be beautiful and perfect for us.
We are the blue orchid.
I love you so much.
Love,
Stacy