Late Bloomer

by Mazey Eddings

No one wanted anything to do with me until I had something monetary to give them, and it’s painful to realize how accurate my sisters’ concerns were about people wanting to use me.

“Flowers are thirsty little sluts. Got it.” “Don’t call the flowers sluts,” Pepper says, brow still furrowed but a soft curl of a smile trying to pull through.

“Respect the flowers’ delicate constitutions and fear of profanity. Understood.”

“So it’s settled. You’ll both move down here and I’ll buy us a mountain mansion and we’ll live out our days listening to folklore and lying in fields of overgrown grass reading June Jordan poems.”

“I know everyone is entitled to an emo phase,” Diksha says, putting the car in park. “But I wish you had the courtesy to experience yours when My Chemical Romance was touring. Then you’d at least have an outlet for the moodiness.”

Fuck anything and anyone that made you have to survive instead of live. You deserve a life so peaceful it feels deliciously boring. A life filled with flowers and sunny days and people who show you all the time that you’re valued and worthy. You deserve it all.”