My mother has an obsession with fresh flowers. She loves to go out to the grocery market, which is conveniently only three minutes from our house, and buy a bouquet of their color-dyed and tacky-looking plants I know I’ll always remember coming home from school in the afternoons, seeing our vase filled with flowers sitting on the kitchen table, and watching my mom eye them proudly every time she passed them. Tulips, daisies, roses, carnations - we’ve had them all, little arrays of rainbows captured in nature living right there in our kitchen.

A few days ago, she came home with a bouquet of yellow daises, and my mother decided to not only display them in our kitchen, but in each of our bedrooms too. So right now, on my bedside table, is a small glass vase with a single yellow daisy. But instead of making me happy every time I look at it, I feel dissapointed, and I’ll explain why.

I killed the flower. Yes, it’s wilting as we speak. Its petals are thin and wispy and kind of gray. Its stem is an unsightly brown-green color. I didn’t mean to kill it. I simply forgot to pour new water into its vase everyday.

I know it’s only a flower and maybe I’m being silly, but I feel ashamed that I let it die. Here was one sweet notion my mother had gone out of her way to do, and I had ruined it in a matter of days. That flower was living and breathing and a part of nature. Technically, it still is. But not for long. Because I killed it.

You don’t get it, do you?

I killed a flower. If I can’t even take care of a stupid flower, what can I do. If I couldn’t remember to water a plant, how can I be expected to remember things such as my social security number or Greek and Latin root words for the SATs or…or…

It’s quite sad actually. That I cannot handle taking care of another living thing.

I guess it just proves that I really do need someone to care of me, someone who will remind me all the things I forget, someone who will try and make things better when I do forget.

And it got me thinking, what if I won’t ever find that person?

Then I’ll be just like my poor daisy, losing all color, wilting away into something that’s not even alive anymore.