Tulips

I carried pink tulips through Amsterdam yesterday and have spent twenty-four hours behaving as though I personally invented spring. #

The tulips opened a little overnight. I noticed before coffee. That is how much attention I am currently giving them. I came into the room half awake, saw the petals had relaxed and immediately went closer as though they might have important information. Yuri entered behind me. «They’re still flowers.» «They opened.» «I can see.» His ability to remain emotionally stable around botanical developments is impressive. Mine is not. They are pink, not the aggressive pink of my 2004 website, thank God, but a softer colour that looks beautiful against the darker parts of the room. I took a photograph before work. Then another because the first had something in the background I disliked. Then moved the vase approximately five centimetres. This is how a normal morning loses seven minutes. I was still on time because Amsterdam has trained me to calculate bicycle journeys with suspicious precision. On the ride to work I saw more tulips and thought about how funny it is that living in the Netherlands has not made them visually ordinary to me. Some clichés survive exposure. Canals too. Bicycles perhaps not, because bicycles have become infrastructure rather than image. Tulips remain decorative enough to keep their magic. Work passed quickly. I thought about Mom while looking at something pink on a screen and nearly messaged her, then got distracted. She called me later anyway. Psychic Italian maternal technology. I told her about the flowers because of course I did. She asked for a picture. I sent one. She approved. Official. After work I came home before Yuri and had that little pocket of solitary time I sometimes love. Shoes off. Music on. Hair up. Window open slightly. I stood in the kitchen eating something directly from its packaging because nobody was there to observe standards. Country music was playing and the flowers were catching late light on the table. For a second the room felt almost too pretty for my actual behaviour. Then I dropped a crumb on my top and balance was restored. Yuri came home, we made dinner, talked about the day. Nothing dramatic. He told me something about the hotel. I told him about the tiny work problem that had occupied too much of my brain. We each pretended to understand the other’s professional details perfectly. Later I edited yesterday’s flower photographs and realised I had turned a seven-euro bunch of tulips into a documented historical event. Fine. I have photographs of less important things. I have photographs of shoes. At least flowers change. They will open, bend, lose petals, become impossible to justify keeping, and eventually I will throw them away reluctantly. Maybe that is why I photograph them. Beauty that announces its expiration date makes me pay attention. Tonight they are still upright, still opening, still pink. The room smells faintly green. My camera is beside the vase because apparently I am prepared for developments.

Remember me, Eclipse.