Utopia #8: The Woman Who Got Flowers in the Morning

            Once, when she was young, she came to the conclusion that flowers were the best gift one could possibly receive. They were beautiful and useless. They were ephemeral. Giving someone flowers, she thought, was like saying “There are no words. There is nothing. Therefore, I must resort to the most useless gesture.” It was then that she decided that, when she would be older, she would get fresh flowers every morning and put them in the lobby of her home, in the living room, in the kitchen, in her bedroom, wherever she pleased.
            She was older now.

​            She had a soft spot for yellow flowers. Maybe it’s because they remind me of the sun, she thought. When she was a little girl, she liked to imagine that, one day, a man would fill her house with yellow flowers. Now, that idea made her laugh. This is better, she thought.

            She cut the stems and put the flowers in the vase at the centre of her heavy, wood kitchen table. When she was done, she would always take a step back and look at the arrangement, taking it in. Then, she would let it become part of the space in which she lived. She lived in a space of yellow flowers.
            “They’re beautiful,” one of the ghosts said.
            “Aren’t they?” she replied.
 
            I should get some blue flowers tomorrow, she thought. That would be nice with the yellow flowers.
 
            At the market, she’d also picked up the freshest fruit she could find. She would spend the day making jam. She had a closet full of jars filled with preserves, for winter.
 
            When she was done, she made herself a cup of tea and brought it to the living room. She sat down on the couch, put her cup down on the coffee table, and picked up the book that was lying next to it. Across from her, a ghost was sitting in the armchair, reading a book of his own. She looked at him and, after a little while, when he was done a paragraph or a page, he looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back and began reading.
 
            They all sat down around the dining room table. They said grace, not because they were religious, but because they were thankful.
 
            At night, she would climb into her king size bed. She could hear the wind passing its hands through the weeping willow outside her bedroom window. Sometimes, it almost sounded like ocean waves. A ghost would always follow her into bed and wrap itself around her, so that she was always already dead, so that she would never worry about anything.
            Yes, tomorrow I will buy blue flowers, she thought.