Sunflower Daydreams - Cullen Harkins

Sunflower Daydreams

CULLEN HARKINS

In a saccharine summer haze, I confessed that I loved them. My mind at that moment was sure that I meant it. Really, it was reality detached dalliance with my contrived conception of them. My infatuation was unrequited, they informed me of that. However, their negations were nebulous, never “noes”, instead: “not yets”. I placed hope in their placations and ignored their indifference, content to spend my summer with a softened gaze and a set heart. Hard set, I sought to pretend and believe in a sunflower daydream. ***** Sunflowers have always been my favorite. Their radiant petals have long since invited my affection. Their proud, brilliant yellow enthrals my awe and anchors my optimism. In their yawning brown bloom I sense serenity. Similar in a sense to incense from a censer, a cloud of petals encompasses their dark center. When they said we shared the same fondness for sunflowers, a symbolic synapse sparked and their name became a sunflower synonym. Submerged in a sea of suspended disbelief, I scrawled for them the following stanza:

Your smile I compare to a sunflower field brightness unyielded the warmth of an uncountable sum of sunflowers This scribbled sentiment was never sent to them; it’s a severed stem from my heart’s sunflower garden. It’s been soaking in water from when my heart was fonder and fading

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away in a vase. Mistaken by a mirage in the heat of my dream, I drowned their roots and flooded the ground beneath them. The love from the cup of my heart running over eroded their earth. The soil on the surface seemed slaked by my sentiments, but beneath and unbeknownst, my passions were pooling. Above and oblivious, I continued to care for them, but the way the sunlight refracted through the shower distracted me, so I didn’t see the water bend and break the stem. I told them I would wait for them. I told them they were incomparable. I told them their blush could shame sunset pink clouds. I told them my commitment to our companionship was unconditional. I told them that they inspired me, in spite of their mired history, none of which I dare repeat out of courtesy to their privacy. Delusion. The adoring allusions I spun were met with feigned amusement. Illusion Idolization of an idealization borne of my ever-active imagination. When my daily ritual of wishing them well began to fail to elicit their attention, I thought nothing. When I needed to glean that they were evading the plans I was making, I saw nothing. When I reached out, wrecked from wrestling depression, for a friend, I got nothing. Then, in that moment, all the days and nights that I dropped my life to stand beside them in their fight were for naught, nothing. My cry for help was met with abject apathy, my platonic plea was seen, read and forgotten. Nothing. Perhaps it was necessary of them to dash my passion against reality, as I am now aware that it can be squandered. Without their lack of concern I would have never accepted nor discerned that some people aren’t worth the water they siphon from my cistern. Days later, disenchanted and disappointed, I disavowed my desire. Mortified, I formulated a parting apology.

Finally, I acknowledged the fault lines forming in my fracturing, fragile fantasy. I addressed the pressure manifesting from my perception of them, admitting that my smitten state was based on a misguided, misgiven intention: a misreading of the attention I was getting. I offered them honest hopes and best regards with my goodbye. Three days later they dare deign to reply--a halfhearted sigh of platitudinous lies when I realized I thrived in their radio silence. After withering and pretending to wish me well, I picked and planted them in their vase. And so they remain: contained by a vessel more fragile than themself. Detained in a heart of fool’s gold and glass. They no longer have a place in my garden. ***** Enough time has passed that the stem sits shriveled in its glass, ready to decompose in the compost of emotions past. The associated dismay and tumult will decay into mulch to cultivate the seed of myself. My own sunflower, planted here, on this page. Sown in sincere reality to spurn an insincere summer surreality. ***** The season has shifted, the seed has germinated. Through patience, my pain has been rehabilitated. Now daybreak is overtaking the horizon of my heart. Shooting skyward shall my sprout of self soon start. My sturdy sunflower stem is strengthened by lessons learned from the one it supplanted. I planted it in the plot of my heart in a spot once dark that now is awashed with daylight. My radiant petals fan out from my serene center, radiating my radical yellow. I have grown to reject the fallacy of my sunflower daydreams. My face has turned heavenward. I will now bask in the sunbeams

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