Page 86 of Picking Daisies on Sundays

My lungs were filling and releasing air. I wasn’t prepared for this conversation. These questions and responses weren’t something I had already rehearsed. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if I knew four years ago that you loved me, I would’ve never let you go.”

No, that couldn’t be true. That didn’t match up with the nightmare I’ve been replaying for years. Levi didn’t love me; he

didn’t love girls like me.

“But what about Bella?” This whole thing started because he cared about her.

He rubbed his face with regret. “Whenever you mentioned my feelings towards her, I let you assume because I thought that made you more comfortable with being around me. That maybe you needed proof that I wouldn’t try to take anything to an intimate level while we pretended to date. But then we kissed, and it stopped before it could’ve started when you mentioned Paris. I thought that was your way of telling me this couldn’t lead anywhere. And even if you wanted to include me at the time, I…I couldn’t leave my family.”

The habitual parts of my brain that collected cobwebs from a lack of change refused to accept what he was saying.

His face twisted with realization. “You don’t believe me?”

I felt lost. All I could picture was how beautiful Bella was, and how her and Levi looked together. Her full lips, sultry eyes, and shiny, commercial hair. That was a girl that was easy to fall in love with. She was gorgeous.

He pulled his bag off of his shoulder and took a book out, handing it over to me. The spine was cracked, and the pages must’ve all been dog-eared at one point. “Read it.”

It was his book. White font, a pastel pink cover, a small table in the bottom corner with two chairs and a vase of daisies. But the front was ruined with marker. A translation:Picking Daisies on Sundays, just like Marty had said, written beside the printed French title. I flipped through the pages and found the same thing: scribbled translations in dark marker on each page, beside the typed French poems.

I started on the first page and read.

My heart has been broken a million times by the same hand, yet I would let it happen a million times again if it meant it was by you

I was weaker than I thought / my heart sagging like the stems of uncut, unkempt flowers because of the sunlight you held in your faraway heart / Maybe you weren’t mine to love / I think I’m falling

The wallpaper above her bed frame was glued in my brain the way it was glued against her walls / I got so close to running my fingers against it / I wish I felt the confidence to tell you the truth, as strongly as I felt stubborn to hide it

Do you hear that? That’s my heart knocking against my chest at the sight of you / I’ve never heard anything more terrifying / how could you provide me air and

suffocate me at the same time?

Blue hydrangeas, pink tulips, red bleeding hearts / it’s all you ever loved, but never yourself / I never understood why anyone spoke poorly of the color brown, it was a dream on you

And that kiss…I think about it all the time / was it wrong of me to think of you when you were never mine? / I feel lucky to have had you, but dismayed to know what life is like without you

Don’t worry if the flowers pass, I’ll be right there to plant you more / and when the soil grows old, I’ll comfort it in the chaos of the storm

Am I a ghost in your story? / because you look at me with conviction when I don’t even know the crime I committed

Burden me with your secrets / so I can carry the weight you’re so fearful of letting go

To be close to you was to be haunted by what I couldn’t have and to be reminded of how much I truly wanted you / and I’d be lying if I said I never thought about where my hands would take me across your body

Midnights and daydreaming hours of retracing steps to how we possibly got here / how did I ever let time pass this long without seeing you? / my heart was so full of our memories that painted my body like a scrapbook

I tried to stop loving you, but along the way, you found your way into the sound of my laugh, the style of my writing, and the threads of my clothes / I would’ve gone down on my knees just to hear you say yes

Neck stiff, legs weak, eyes set on what we could’ve looked like if you hadn’t left / ‘moving on’ was a broken record that I never had the strength to lift the needle off of / If hearts were meant to love then why did mine feel so empty? / and suddenly, I fell

Glances, gazes, eyes following places they shouldn’t have seen / intimacy was to be seen by you; free falling was to be touched by you / there was no such thing as a crowded room where you stood

She lives in between the pinks and yellows of the world / where a beautiful color is unknown to others / and when she speaks, I become a bee enthralled in a field of daisies

My eyes couldn’t absorb the words quick enough, catching words and phrases, the poems just kept going.Daisies, bleeding hearts, wallpaper above her bed frame.

“I—I don’t understand,” I said. My hands were shaking holding onto the book tight. His written words kept ringing in my ears.Do you hear that? That’s my heart knocking against my chest at the sightof you.