It is often felt, and less remarked upon, that the most bothersome thing in the world is to wait. It requires both patience and a strong mind to allow enough time to pass for a resulting outcome, one that may not even be favorable. Still, one can only know whether to rejoice or grieve after the wait. And yet, the process is not something that can be so easily rushed or delayed in the midst of staying still for an expectation to pass.
Selene scrapes her boots raw with the act of pacing over and over in a trail of crushed snow. The friction from her restless steps has made the icy stone beneath her too slippery to walk on, but her mind couldn’t be further from the risk of falling flat on her face. She can only think of awaiting the arrival of her late companion.
She ruminates the path she took to complete the maze and turns it forward and back in her mind. Indeed, if her friend wishes to meet her, she would have to complete a troublesome course of turns and revisited corners to finally reach the quiet retreat of the garden Selene now waits in.
Oh, how she wishes Bloom hadn’t taken all the wrong turns at the very start of the hedge labyrinth. It would simply be too easy to never reach the end.
Selene finally pauses in her anxious tirade, adjusting her velvet cloak to hug her shoulders tighter for the needed warmth. She looks around her dim surroundings, until a porcelain bench waiting by a cedar tree starts looking much more appealing than walking circles around a slipping hazard. Her gaze washes over the towering, resilient figure of drooping branches as she relaxes in her seat. She praises the evergreen bark for standing tall while other greens become dormant and wither away. A sure and certain conjecture she likes to sound in her head is that there’s so much more beauty when nature isn’t blinded by white flecks of crystals that bite. She particularly dislikes it when the snow not only hides away its color, but also causes its life to shrivel away.
Selene’s eyes follow the tree bark to its roots, where bushes crowd and tuck around it. A hefty sigh leaves her throat as she spots a poppy nearly buried entirely by snow. She picks it up without a moment’s hesitation and inspects it in her palm. It must’ve been a vibrant saffron red before it faded to a pale, barely-there shade. That didn’t matter much to her. She pockets it in her coat, promising to give it a second purpose in life, belonging to that pressed in between the pages of a loved novel.
The long-winded wait has forced Selene to sit still in a shroud of falling snow, freezing her in a trap of her own thoughts. It’s one thing to have an admiration for flowers, and another to dream of leaving her 9-5 behind to don an apron and care for petals all day in an establishment of her own. She even had a name for it. Her very own flower shop: Hyacinth Lane.
Selene finds herself smiling at nothing. She could see the vision so clearly now. She’d beam up every time the doorbell rings and customers come bustling in the summer– to purchase a bouquet for a lover, to ask for special occasion discounts, or to simply bathe one’s eyes on the selection of colors and the scent of pollen in the air. Maybe Selene would wear a gardenia flower on her ear when she’s reached a sale quota for the day. Or would she be too busy trimming stems and arranging pots by the window?
She’d be happy either way. You know, if she actually did become a florist.
But she’s really not, is she? Selene has spent too many times checking the balance of her financial accounts, to see if she’d make the month’s rent with her meager salary as a bank teller. It’s ironic handling so much of other people’s money just to earn so little pay at the end of the day. Needless to say her debts would double if she were brave enough to start up her own flower shop. It wasn’t right. None of it was.
So Selene settles for these quiet moments, staring into what could never be in a haze of conflicting desires, so she can keep living life and make do with the little positivity she can find that used to come so easy in her younger days.
It is at that moment, her feet propel her through the depths of snow with the strength of her determination, past the garden and back into the maze. It wouldn’t be that odd if she were to meet Bloom halfway. She’d help her finish the puzzling labyrinth just as she had. All rational thought leaves her, to be replaced with wishful fantasies, as she moves backward, back into the cycle, back to square one.
A shadow flits across the edge of her vision, icicles gleaming like diamonds. Fractals of snow melt into the hem of a fur-lined cape, a splash of blood-scarlet on watercolour ivory. It is a woman, lithe-limbed and ruby-lipped, then a man, strong-jawed and iron-cut, then neither and both all at once, then not a human at all—a pane of stained glass, a residual smear of ash, a wisp of smoke in the wind.
She pauses. A trick of the light?
“Bloom?” she tries.
The hedges rustle. The snow drifts, flurries, swirls around her boots, a rhapsody of frostbite that nips into the spaces beneath her stockings, the veins that the fabric cannot reach. Dyes them blue as a sapphire sky. A shudder runs down Selene’s spine, setting her arms alight. Goosebumps pricks up over her skin as she propels herself forward, forward, forward, turning corners she has twined herself around so many times before, eyes scanning white snow and hanging icicles for something, anything.
“Bloom?”
Something crunches beneath her heel, and Selene whirls around—a second too late. A menagerie of petals lines the ground beneath her feet, half-sunken into the snow. Almost instinctively, she crouches down, reaching out for them, but they are dry, desiccated, crumbling between her fingers until she can hardly tell what flower they used to be, nothing but brown ash sliding over her palms. Selene stands up. Turns another corner as the last remnants of what used to be a rose flits into the snow.
“Bloom?”
She almost crashes into a dead end, stopping just in time. Spinning back on her heel, Selene heads back the way she came—maybe Bloom is already there. Maybe Bloom already made it out to the maze. Her feet skid over fresh snow—crunch, crunch, crunch, snowfall and flowers both, crackling beneath her feet, a roaring inferno—
Her toe snags on a branch, sending her crashing to the ground. The cold sinks ivory fangs into the skin of her knees, a mortal wound against the nightingale cage of her heart. The air rushes out of her in a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, fogging out in a translucent haze, spilling over her lips like white wine. Selene’s hand drifts to her ankle, pain twanging harshly beneath her feeble touch. Bloom is not there.
Selene crumples. She crashes and burns.
It all starts with the orchid.
Sarah tugs her in past the chiming glass door no matter how many times she insists she has class in twenty, hair frizzled in seven different directions. Selene gives in more easily than she should, especially when her cousin plants her in the nearest chair and shoves a steaming mug of coffee into her hands.
The moment Sarah disappears, Selene tilts her head back, allowing herself to just—breathe, really, sucking in lungfuls of floral air like it’s the only oxygen she’ll ever need as her eyes dance around the vibrant verdigris lining the walls of the shop. Madame’s is the best florist in town, and the only, and it shows, with flora decorating the tiny shop from top to bottom—most, Selene can name, and some, she cannot.
“I just don’t know what to do with this!” Sarah exclaims as she bursts through the side door, thrusting a potted plant into Selene’s hands. “It just won’t bloom!”
Selene studies the plant—a neatly closed-up orchid, the outsides of its petals dyed faint purple. Cattleya labiata, and she’d be surprised if it did bloom, given that the city chill can hardly hold a candle to its Costa Rican origins. Still, she can’t quite tell Sarah that her internship won’t be at stake just because one plant won’t bloom, because Sarah will retort, You think I’m overreacting, don’t you? and Selene will sit back, and wait for her to finish, as she always does—so instead, she opts for a gentle, “You need to be patient.”
“It’s been a week,” Sarah wails, hands flying to her head. “If it doesn’t bloom soon, Madame will kill me, I know she will, and—”
Her words die on her lips. Selene cannot bring herself to look at her cousin’s expression, for all her eyes can take in is the orchid on her lap, petals unfolding into full bloom.
Bloom, she thinks, in every lilac petal. Bloom, she thinks, as violet skirts unfold from the delicate flower like salsa dancers in a ballroom. Bloom, she thinks, watching the orchid lift its face towards the sky. Bloom, bloom, bloom.
“You’re right,” she says, rising to her feet so abruptly that Sarah jolts. “Madame will probably fire you. You should quit yourself before that happens.”
Selene traipses out of the shop, clouds beneath her feet as Sarah yells after her to come back. She thinks about the orchid, about the way its petals had unfolded, almost as if curling down the legs of a slender, willowy creature. Her gaze drifts to a nearby dianthus, Sweet William in white and red and pink, waving cheerfully from its outdoor pot despite the chill nipping Selene’s cheeks cherry-red. Heather all purple and gold, stark against a storefront window. A lone orange snapdragon bleeding through the dreariness of the endless winter her city holds to its chest in an eternal embrace, a green light against a sea of invisible red. She sees it all, and her mind whispers: bloom, bloom, bloom.
For the first time in a very long while, a smile tugs the corners of Selene’s mouth upwards. She will quit her job, and she will become Madame’s newest employee after Sarah inevitably quits hers too. She will care for the shop and hold an invisible hand whenever it reaches to her, beckoning like the branch of a tree. And perhaps, she will start her own, and she will see her muse in every open petal until she can reach out and pluck them from their thorny pedestal. Until she can hold them to her chest, right next to her heart.
She stares out at the diorama of flowers pockmarking the white city, and she watches it all Bloom.
Selene whispers the same name under her clouding breath as she staggers up on her trembling legs, flinching from the nasty gash in her knee. Her life-long companion eludes her now in her earnest search. After all the trouble of retracing her vanished steps, even her desperation has limits as she curses on her way back to the garden bench.
To wait is to hope, and by hoping, Selene can keep Bloom’s existence remembered.
At some point, Selene has accepted the possible reality that Bloom may never meet her again whether in or out of challenging circumstances. In fact, she might just know it’s true. But there remains to be someone sitting by a bench, under a cedar tree, always waiting and always hoping. Even if it’s for nothing.
Written by Sarina and Amberlyn
Edited by Hoe Yan
