They once called us flowers

They said our skin was made of snowbells,

our lips were like lush petals kissed by the blood of an angel.

We were roses; we had thorns

that made us play hard-to-get.

The only thing we ever did

was giggle and smile.

We were perfect.

We were

perfect flower girls that turned heads as they walked through town

Perfect flower girls that were immune to any emotion besides happiness

Perfect flower girls that seemed like we couldn’t possibly be real.     

They said they would love us forever.

And with our whole hearts, we believed them.

But as the creases became more apparent

the cracks that came with our age erupted on our once smooth petals

as giggles were replaced with sighs and

smiles with looks of indifference

As happy mixed with confusion and sadness and questions…

They stopped calling us flowers.

And all of a sudden,

We were Monsters.

Forever

a word filled with such naive hope and promise,

became nothing more than another betrayal.

another vow they never kept,

another word they turned their back on.

We could only watch as they began to turn their backs on us, too.

For weeks on end, they disappeared.

Without the nourishment of their words to feed our starving stems

our petals turned crinkled shades of browns,

our leaves began to shrivel in starvation.

We were too weak to run away.

When they finally returned

and laid their eyes upon our decaying bodies

their faces became twisted with disgust.

Hate rose from their palms

anger boiled in their bones

We knew they had come back to attack.

As they began their assault,

we suffered silently.

we remembered

How their eyes were once silk

stroking our cheeks and cupping our faces

But no.

Their eyes were now knives tracing our every feature

criticizing our every freckle

making slashes on our cheeks too numerous to count.

Their words stabbed pain into our skin

until pain was all we were made of.

Tears from our eyes spurted out like the blood from our hearts

and for the first time, we were crying.

We were crying for the things we never realized,

the things we should have known.

Because

they loved us while we were flowers

while we were young

while we played games

while we had no weaknesses

while our only emotion was happy.

However, the moment we shed our semblance of perfection,

the moment we became real,

we became monsters.

We were nothing else.

There was nothing left of us but the ugly.

The ugly emotions

the wrinkles

The bruised hearts

the need for unconditional love.

They called us monsters.

But how could they have called us monsters,

when all we were finally becoming was human?