Arabela

I used to rip my mother’s flowers apart. She’d place them in large vases around the house, as if they could create a false sense of peace. I would shred the flowers and leaves, breaking off the thorns surrounding them. Then Arabela would break the vase and grind the pieces into the dirt with rocks, decimating them and destroying all evidence so it could never be used as a weapon against us.
Do you believe in heaven? They say it’s breathtaking, blooming with flowers stretching out across the hills. I can imagine their scent, so intoxicatingly strong like poison on my lips. It’s too much of a good thing, in my opinion.
I used to know a place that looked like heaven, with flowers and everything. During summer, the scent of them would wrap around your senses at night and choke you with a passion. Petals would wither and die, turning into a dirty mulch on the ground.
If heaven is a garden, then I wonder what hell is? What type of hidden fires burn there, determined to destroy my feelings and watch them burn to ash, while twisted smoke rises?
That house was paradise on the outside, but you could hear the wind screaming as you stood on the hillside and laid flowers upon your lover’s grave. You could walk through the graveyard for miles, and never find an exit. There was no escaping from our little handmade prison, and whenever the wind began to howl, we were happy. Happy because it hid the screaming and the crying.
Arabela was always bleeding. I used to feel pain just by watching, because she took the beatings that were meant for me. I tried to kiss the pain away, but that only smeared the blood across my lips, leaving a more permanent stain within me.
Arabela was the one who read me to sleep, brushed my hair, and held my hand. Arabela was my world growing up, and now she’s gone.
After she left, I went out into the garden and ripped up all the carnations. I chopped the heads off and ate the petals, as if by doing so, I could make her stay with me. I tried to assimilate her into me and make her live again, to rewind time and start over.
I hit rewind.
Again.
And again. Until my mind was going crazy because I knew there was no way to get her back.
Both paradise and hell are empty now. And the flowers are all rotting.