Congratulations on Planting All Those Flowers!

Rows upon rows, they’ll stretch from the car to your front steps. They’ll turn with the wind, as if they were trying to smile, and even when it rains, which it how it seems on most days of late, they’ll glimmer with sunlight.

You’ll have planted them all at night, blindly fumbling for colors so that they mesh awkwardly, as if they’d been choreographed by a child. The ordered rows, intended to form a sort of living flag, will not have emerged at all, replaced by a chaotic morass of petals that spell out not the birth of a nation, but the song of love for the woman you loved.

So when she gets out of bed the next morning and sees that you spent the night sleeping in your car, sees you, hair disheveled, hands covered in dirt, she won’t flip out that you dug up your entire yard and replaced it with flowers in a grand romantic gesture. She also won’t forget you fucked her sister in the bathroom that one night, so many months ago.

But she will see something in you, something of the man she once knew and loved. It won’t be as bright as it was, it won’t be the shimmering human being who once convinced her to marry him and move to Seattle. But it’ll be enough to make her hold the door open for you as you shuffle inside, to make you coffee and to sit and talk, for the first time in what seems like months, about who you are, what you are, and what you’re going to become over coffee. It’ll be enough for her to give you a chance, if not a second chance.

One word of advice: do not, under any circumstances, mention her sister.

Good luck.

Congratulations on Planting All Those Flowers!