Forget-me-not

Here is another story that I have been thinking on. As you may have noticed, most of my personal projects are only beginnings. They also share characters or at least names. Truthfully, I can't decide if they are all part of one big tale or if I should cut them apart. I was thinking that the first post I put up under "Nighttime" (The Crowe's Wing, which if no one noticed, I lengthened) would be more of a fairytale/memory within the following story. I am still not sure. It is all quite convoluted, but here goes. BTW, general knowledge of flower meanings makes the first sentence clearer. (I wish flowers still meant something to people.) Also, the words that seem to be out of order are on purpose.

"My mother Pilar found once in her high-walled garden a sweet-faced stranger to sugar her day. He offered her a red, thornless rose at which she smiled, but refused. A peach rose she gave him in stead and did not think once till the morning next. When dawn did come, slipping gentle fingers across her face and beneath her eyelids, she found by her side no man, but a bundle of forget-me-nots in his shape. She placed him about the house in every vessel she owned, but he withered soon enough, and she understood that his thoughts had left her just as all true remembrance of him had disappeared that lost morning. She sought to rid herself of the withered flowers, but in their midst she found a flourishing Daisy, and so it was that she first knew my name. I did not come into her life until many months passed, but I had always been a friend to her.
When I crawled from death into the beginnings of life, Pilar gave up her strangers and her high walls. Though I was just blooming, petals just opened to the sun, her life had moved into summer, a time for picking and plucking and sowing seeds. In the country, away from the bustle and life of tall cities, we grew up together as friends often do, she to be my mother and I to be her child. There was never a father for me, but it mattered not. There was enough love in our lives to bloom a field of wildflowers on a winter’s day. More than just each other, we adored the life of the country and all of the beautiful living things that reciprocated our affection. Vines caught up my glowing sunshine skin, given me by a father I never met, helping me along as I learned to walk, as that mysterious man never would. I would spend mornings watching the flowers open to the day’s sun and ferns uncurl their feathery arms to the world. Evenings, I collected the seeds that the plants dropped and placed them in small jars, each seed to its own, though sometimes I mixed the seed and scattered them, a blend of flowers appearing as if by magic months later. It was magic, in its own way, a form of magic that is no longer acknowledged. I enchanted my own life with these small, wonderful spells, some times with Pilar, others without. We loved without clinging and she came and went from my world as elusively as a summer wind.
There was always something about Pilar that enchanted, and so it came to be that in her wanderings she acquired something of a magical touch, more than was hers already. Our house was a fire-lit world of possibility and illusion, not the chill of truth. The magic of the world wandered in after her like the powder of snow tracked in on a shoe or the seeping of cold through a thin wooden door. In morning, I would walk into our kitchen to find something ever so slightly different. Never anything obvious that our bloodhound neighbors would sniff out in their short, infrequent visits. A light, turquoise teacup would sit to the side, where the day before it had been a squat, red mug. Or the flowers that were withered were again filled with life. I began to see the signs for when something would change. “This pan is not to my liking,” she might say of a tarnished skillet, riddled with burnt crumbs. The next day a new saucepan would hang from its peg, as if the blackened, old thing had never been. Her small magics did not always work. The turquoise teacup, a lovely little thing, perched on its shelf for a full sennight, but when at last I resolved to use it, it forgot that it was small and turquoise, reverting to the speckled, heavy-set mug in my hands. When I told her of it though, she doubled over herself with laughter. “Why, Child, you did not think it was real, surely?” and that was that.
So it was that our lives were filled by a flowering assortment of busy nothings, all of them many times more meaningful than the prosiness that occupied the lives of our unhappy neighbors. I did not socialize often with the local girls – they were not to my taste in all their grandiloquence, empty and superficial as the turquoise teacup. The boys were more interesting, working the magic of land and helping small things grow into living greenery. Those they always killed though, and when harvest time came it was always apparent that their life giving was an action borne of greed and ignorance. I do not mean to say that I had no friends. Mine were with me always in the cool earth that cushioned my step and the wind that picked at my hair, twirling it into braids, murmuring secrets to my heart. I did not need any other kind of friend, never really have. When I have been gifted with them dawn was always the giver.
Just as that rose-fingered man woke my mother to find me in a vase of flowers, he also pushed a tired black crowe over the red-rimmed horizon one fine spring morning, just after I had passed my nineteenth summer. Wings that flapped as weakly as tree leaves in a light fall breeze alerted me to his presence. They haunted the edge of my vision, as I looked down that dawn at a small, red friend of mine who roved busily about my hand. He was unavoidable, as much as I tried to resist the allure of deep black night that thrived under his feathers. So I looked at him and saw, truly saw. His heart of hearts fled to me, though we had never known one another before. I would know him ever day after to forever. Despite his blackness, eyes shone from under midnight brows with the same intensity as the sunlight reflecting off of a snow-capped mountain. They were the same blinding white, and as my own simple green eyes met them my heart let out a startled cry of shocked recognition. Mine, it cried out and moments later the crowe let out an equally exultant cry of triumph. Mine, he seemed to reply, for I knew without doubt that this shadow on the horizon was male, just as I knew that somehow a last part of my life had fallen into place like a piece of puzzle or a line of song.
In that moment, I could do naught but look into the snowy gaze and ask myself what love was? It seemed to me a flighty patch of wind that guided the wings of the heart in unexpected directions full of treacherous, pinwheeling turns. This was not quite it though. It was not the flush of heat and blood that is Desire nor was it the light, warm, skin-deep glow of Friendship. Love seemed the experience of encountering a face in the dark and recognizing the soul that it hid as part of yourself. Love was looking into the mirror and seeing a face that was stranger, yet dearer than your own. As I would know this crowe every day henceforth, I would too never see my face in the mirror again, but this small shadow. My heart, stranger as it was to this silhouette and this feeling, unable to understand either, felt the beat of pure, unconditional love nonetheless. This crowe, I knew, would take my heart and offer it back to me with a smile. In a way, he already had. My heart had found a friend at last. My eyes looked into white a moment more, and then he was gone."

Goodnight, reader.