The Flowers I Used to Wait for Someone Else to Buy

There’s a bucket of flowers by the registers at my grocery store – the not-quite-perfect kind, ranunculus with a couple of bruised petals, whatever didn’t make the wedding-order cut.

Nine dollars.

I’ve walked past that bucket at least once a week for years.

For most of that time, I didn’t buy them. Not because nine dollars mattered – it didn’t, and I know how that sounds, so I’ll just say it plainly and move on. I didn’t buy them because somewhere along the way I’d decided flowers were something you were given, not something you gave yourself. Evidence that someone else had noticed you, thought of you, chosen you that day.

Buying my own felt a little like admitting out loud that nobody had.

Last Wednesday I bought them anyway. No occasion, nothing to mark. I stood in the checkout line with a bunch of ranunculus next to a rotisserie chicken and the string cheese I buy out of habit, and the cashier didn’t comment because why would she – and that was sort of the whole point.

Nobody was supposed to notice. I was just allowed to have them.

I’ve written before about the year my marriage ended and what it forced me to look at – the notebook, the audio I was skeptical of trying anyway, all of it.

What I haven’t said as directly is that somewhere in the middle of that year, I stopped waiting for someone else to supply the evidence that my life was good. I started supplying it myself, in small and sometimes embarrassingly literal ways.

Flowers I bought myself. A candle lit on an ordinary Tuesday for no one in particular. Dinner plated properly even when I was eating alone at the counter, because I’d decided I counted as someone worth setting a table for.

None of that is dramatic, and I want to be careful not to make it sound like it was. I’ll say plainly that being able to spend nine dollars on flowers without a second thought is its own kind of privilege, and I don’t take it for granted. But the shift underneath it was never really about money.

It was about who I was waiting on. For a long time, it was someone else. Now, more often than not, it’s just me – deciding a Wednesday is worth a little color on the table.

I didn’t own a vase that fit them, so they’re sitting in a mason jar on my kitchen table right now, tilting slightly to one side. I haven’t fixed that. I think I kind of like that I haven’t.

If you’re in the part of your own year where you’re still waiting for someone to hand you proof that things are okay, I don’t have a tidy fix for that, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they do.

I just wanted to say it’s possible to stop waiting, in small and unglamorous ways, long before the bigger things sort themselves out.

With Love, Wren

I write the more unfinished version of these thoughts – the ones I haven’t worked out how to shape into a post yet – in my newsletter first. If that’s useful to you, it’s a quiet, low-key corner of my inbox worth joining.