Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.
It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.
Stranno e, che vsichki greshki sv'rshvat ednakvo, che vinagi gi povtariame i prod'lzhavame s novi nadezhdi. Tsiala noshch khapem ustni, kh'ltsame v'v v'zglavnitsata s bezpomoshchen gniav i tv'rdo se zaklevame da ostanem samotni, a shchom s'mne, podnasiame dushata si kato nezhen balon ot ts'fnalo glukharche na nasreshchnite vetrove na zhivota i te go roniat i raznasiat. Ala koito spasi samo edno malko pukhche i go vnese na zavet, toi e spasil tsialata si dusha. Tova e gorchiva rabota, no koito ne obr'shcha nezhnoto tsvete na dushata si k'm vetrovete na izpitaniiata, dori tsialoto da go spasi i da go prenese dokrai, toi ne mozhe da pochuvstva, che izobshcho niakoga go e imal.
"Hey Alecto, film this!" she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. "On second thought, why don't you come up here? It's a blast being up here." "I don't really like to be in high places," said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground. "If you don't like being in high places, then why'd you take so many drugs in the seventies?" Mandy questioned jokingly. "Do you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?" Alecto threatened coldly. "You'd never do that, we're best friends!" Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. "Even in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we'll still be best friends!" She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970's, standing on top of a slide at a children's playground. Alecto didn't seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she'd asked him to."
"Benjamin Munro was his name. She mouthed the syllables silently, Benjamin James Munro, twenty-six years old, late of London. He had no dependents, was a hard worker, a man not given to baseless talk. He'd been born in Sussex and grown up in the Far East, the son of archaeologists. He liked green tea, the scent of jasmine, and hot days that built towards rain. He hadn't told her all of that. He wasn't one of those pompous men who bassooned on about himself and his achievements as if a girl were just a pretty-enough face between a pair of willing ears. Instead, she'd listened and observed and gleaned, and, when the opportunity presented, crept inside the storehouse to check the head gardener's employment book. Alice had always fancied herself a sleuth, and sure enough, pinned behind a page of Mr. Harris's careful planting notes, she'd found Benjamin Munro's application. The letter itself had been brief, written in a hand Mother would have deplored, and Alice had scanned the whole, memorizing the bits, thrilling at the way the words gave depth and color to the image she'd created and been keeping for herself, like a flower pressed between pages. Like the flower he'd given her just last month. "Look, Alice"- the stem had been green and fragile in his broad, strong hand- "the first gardenia of the season."