I fucking hate roadkill. I hate seeing it. not to say that anyone loves seeing roadkill but i know at least one of you have wanted to photograph it. Maybe it has something to do with my herbivorous compassion but it’s really because it had no chance. All animals seem like little babies even though they could be much older and wiser than me.



They don’t know i care, they don’t even know who i am.



It’s also because they just died on the road. Not just dead but killed. On accident or within intent; ground into the asphalt and continuing to get further smushed. Until its just dried up blood and people got where they needed to go.

I just can’t look at it.



It’s gross but that’s also their ending. They didn’t know that they didn’t have time to preserve everything that they wanted to. And when I accidentally do see it I want to cry and throw up and I haven’t thrown up since i was a newborn. Not bragging. I’ve felt so nauseous to the point where I start praying that my body would throw up just this once and I am not religious. I get jealous seeing your hair held back.



I’ve been praying recently and I haven’t seen roadkill in a long time.



I had combined both bunches because I thought floristry was easy.

It is not.

I put the pink ones in the middle and the white all around.

Objectively ugly especially to a florists eye but I didn’t display them for how they looked, only for how they got into my hands.



The buds had started to wilt.

They actually dropped the day after.

The petals knew before my body did, before my veins did but not before my mind did.

I could see her veins poking through.

I ripped the full yet drooped buds off of their stems, placed them on old cardboard and let them to dry before pressing.

They were still half alive before I had ripped them off of their source.

I was selfish. I wanted their memories for myself.

I didn’t care that the bouquet looked even worse than before to preserve meant so much more.

I wanted to press the petals in my baby of a journal under all the books that I pretended to have read.

The books that I keep for my future place.

The books I took from the garage for the same reason I set up the roses.

I never felt motherly until i started to love myself.

I wanted the petals to stain the two pages they were between.

Beautiful, silky, unlined, untouched paper.

I wanted the colour to bleed into all of the words i had written to myself.

The pages were only ever for me to see no matter how much they mentioned so many others. There is so much desire in those pages and just as much love.



I don’t want them to die without purpose, without an imprint at least.

I have choice here.

They will die no matter what I do but at least they’ll be mine.

I want each vein and every colour that seeps from them to be permanently imprinted into a book that I will never throw away.



I don’t want to bury them behind pages for them to stay out of sight.

I want them between the safety of paper and all its fragility.

Strong enough to preserve but not enough to keep alive.

I just want to keep.

I am highly sentimental but I do not know any other way.

And truthfully, there is no such thing as too sentimental unless it is damaging. And it isn’t.

It doesn’t have to be painful

i mean it is but it really fucking isn’t at all. The petals are here to stay. I kept them.



Petals so fragile when wet even more delicate after I press.

From tearing to just crumbling.

Petals and perspective. Petals in perspective. Perspective is power.

She is so much stronger and smarter than me.

I want to listen to her.

One might say that staining such pages would be ruining them.

How can something so meaningful ruin anything?

The stains, the ruining, it’s all love.

My life is in those pages.

She remembers more than me, it appreciates and cherishes everything all of the time.

It holds them for my mind for when I don’t have time remember.

She is the most vulnerable and in ways the only thing i’ve ever created.

She can’t be sold or viewed by anyone but she is my art.



And she could burn tomorrow. She could burn tonight.



Every single word. All my thought, all my love. Every unlined and untouched page that was waiting to be filled. Little laminated prints I had collaged in to break up the words.Single copies of purikuraprints. All the letters and postcards that started to warp the pocket in the back cover.



But all the dried petals would catch fire quicker than the rest of it



Now; ash.



Blowing away with the summer wind.



I would lose everything I created its all in my bones somewhere.

Embedded.

I wouldn’t lose the petals either. I kept a handful to bury in snow.