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Flowers v. Showers

Posted on January 31, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She was constantly hinting that he would be better off with more showers and fewer flowers and it always confused him. What she really meant was that they should take more showers together so that he would need to buy her fewer flowers. He didn’t quite get the logic because he had chosen to focus on the rhyming pattern (between flowers and showers) instead of thinking about what the two words actually implied.

She hated that she had to spell stuff out for him and even though he knew that he could make things easier on their relationship he didn’t always know how he was supposed to figure out what those things were. The whole showering together thing freaked him out a bit because he wasn’t ready to really watch a girl clean herself. A naked girl was sexy only in certain circumstances and he didn’t think that the angles he could see her from during a shower would allow him to fully appreciate the angles he watched her from during sex. Not necessarily a point that was clear to her. He was one of those guys who required a certain frame of mind before getting naked in the presence of a woman; even if that woman happened to be the one he was living with.

So she sat down on the bed making an indentation that forced him to lean against her and explained that the showers and flowers were both symbolic, in her statement as well as in life. While bringing her flowers could be for anything from, ‘I was just thinking of you’ to ‘Happy Birthday/Anniversary/St. Patrick’s Day’ they were also the enduring, globally recognized symbol for “I’m sorry.” Sharing a shower stall could help them establish a connection that was not about sex and the act would help foster a sense of openness that would overflow into other areas of their lives, ensuring fewer occasion where flowers would be called upon to aid a frustrated apology.

He couldn’t take his mind off the fact that her weight on the bed was causing him to have to exert energy to ensure that their bodies weren’t touching. So intent was he on nodding along just so that she would shift her body weight or get up and sit somewhere else that he completely missed the point.

Nearly a week later he confided in a friend that she was stifling him. Two weeks after that he picked a fight for no good reason and walked out of their apartment.

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