Daisy

• Ingrid Taylor, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2015

I called you a Daisy once– In passing, because it had been so long since I had stopped just to smell the flowers. And there you were so elegantly sweet in your yellow dress, white laced cardigan. Shining the sun between your lips. So divinely enchanting. You never stopped either. Always on the move, always radiating that warmth from your ribcage. Always keeping roots in everyone—always grounded.
A breath. A breath is all it ever took for me, for your petals to wrap around every single pore. To pull me in entirely—from out this meadow and into your embrace. For your scent to touch the parts of me thought lost in a long winter’s breeze, a cold lover’s scorn. Never not one to offer support, even when your stem is barely strong enough to hold the weight of your own.
You, a goddess in mortal skin. A flower in the desert. A queen disguised in your own insecurities. Obviously sent from above to take me to that Garden of Eden. The one spoken of in poems of old. In hymns sung by those living in that elegance. Those Romantics capturing my intrigue and my envy with every passing verse.
Ah but lost along the way you were. Caught up in a journey to Mecca, to the greatness you’d always deserved. To the place within yourself where you are not a lone flower in a barren field. One where you may not be alone in your grace. And flourish in the poise of natural charm bestowed only upon the flora of this world.

In her mind she thought herself an enigma. A force of nature that left a wake of disaster behind her—the Katrina’s—leaving lives in turmoil and houses in ruins. She never saw that the wind she carries brings with it not harm—but the pleasant aroma of nostalgia. To the days of sea-breezes and picnics at the coast.
She thought herself a tsunami, wrecking up the beach community of Sanriku. Drowning the innocent. Killing and maiming, effectively devouring the world in her depths.

But she is the creek in the forest of my home town. A peaceful tide. A calming wave. Beauty in the simplicity of her being.
She is everywhere, all at once every day. And I never noticed her until– in passing. I realized she was a Daisy.
And I’ve always loved Daisies.