On Fake Flowers

My business partner does not care for Halloween. He is certain that it is not a season’s celebration but rather meant to be a single day. For very young children. When the team suggested decorating the store, he shut it down so swiftly they were left stunned, mouths agape, as if they had been hit in the head by a gourd.

A month’s life for the skeleton on the door may be a bit too long for my tastes, but the year-round full blooms of fake flowers affixed to awnings across the city— now those are the undead that really spook me.

Actually, fake flowers by themselves don’t scare me. Before a year ago, whenever I was asked how I feel about them, literally nothing came to mind. They just don’t register. While I am fine with them in your grandmother's foyer, artificial flowers are simply not my style. They certainly have nothing to do with floristry. Honestly, a french fry has more in common with a flower than those things. At least a fry grows from a plant, offers a peak moment before it goes to wilt (which is its own kind of delicious as long as the ketchup is not cold).

Here's a question no one has ever asked me, what do fake flowers make me think about. The answer to that is not nothing. It is Botox.

It seems all my friends have gotten Botox recently. Or I just noticed— or rather, I was told to notice. That’s the thing about Botox, you’re supposed to notice, but you are not supposed to really notice. So, my not paying attention has always seemed the nice thing to do.

I've made appointments for the preventative prick more than once myself. But like unloading the dishwasher, the second part has proved more difficult and I have yet to actually make the appointment.

That said, I have no problem with other people showing up for theirs. If a bit of Botox makes my friends feel more beautiful and happy, I want that for them…even if I can’t tell how they are feeling from the expression on their face. I can joke because my friends , like me, want to find the levity in life, whether or not they want the laugh lines.

It is, of course, my personal form of vanity that has kept me from going the Botox route. ‘She looks so young’ or ‘She doesn’t look a day over 30’ are not compliments I imagine. If I were to wish a whisper in my wake it would be, ‘She’s aged so well’ or ‘Great pants!’

Anyway, it was around this time last year, almost halloween and not far from my 40th, when I first felt the real fear of the fake. Passing a canopy of plastic pink peony on my walk to market, I overheard a sentence that haunts me still

'I just love the sense of nature they give," the admirer said.

The idea that these zip-tied zombie flowers had anything to do with nature, that the ideal is everlasting and never aging misses the point. That is a denial of nature, not an appreciation. The beauty is found in the ephemeral and the entropy, the grace in the ease and sense of humor with which we let go.

-Taylor