It is rumored that he had a flower garden in his backyard.

Like a stamped envelope, the backyard itself was large, but the garden occupied a very small corner. An uncommon type of flower bloomed there: a small, delicate blossom of deep indigo with fragile petals. Sometimes he wondered if the flower was actually a weed, as the plant, bitter fragrance and all, quietly persisted regardless of how much he ignored it. He preferred to attend to his expansive front lawn with its lush golf grass, brightly-colored ornaments, and wooden adirondack chairs.

She wished that he would give her a bouquet of these flowers.

Though she had occasionally received flowers like these before in the past, she had never received them from him. Sadly, she was not hopeful that he would ever deliver such a nosegay to her.

“If he ever meant to,” she said, “he would have already done so.”

Such a floral offering would not represent affection—she did not want that and knew that whatever designs he once had for her had since disappeared. For him to acknowledge the blooms in his garden, pull them from his lawn, collect them together, walk out of his house, find her, and give them to her personally did not seem unreasonable—at least to her. Though she knew that the flowers would not survive long and that, frankly, she would throw them out after a day or two, this gesture would not be lost upon her.

Others murmured that he never gave these flowers to anyone—he was simply too busy tending to his front lawn to even acknowledge that these small flowers crept from his backyard. Though dainty and beautiful, they were of little value to him and he certainly had no desire to put forth the effort to display these blooms, let alone give them away.

She had little difficulty filling the vases in her house: Friends and lovers delivered blossoms of all shapes and sizes to adorn her space and the intoxicating fragrances constantly tickled her nose. Sometimes, she encountered an empty vase and it was then that she wondered if he would ever send her those small, indigo flowers—

—though she already knew that the time for that had likely already passed.