Needs
She bought the sunflower on a good day, the kind that doesn't lend you a moment to yourself to stop and think before you act. She'd spent the day with girls from her brand new dorm--stereotypical freshman moving in delighted, directionless hordes. There was a man who looked to be homeless or on his way to it selling flowers outside the cafeteria. She'd bought one, because she had cash and wanted to look generous and because one of her friends from home loved sunflowers, and it seemed great to have a favorite flower to love, so she'd try sunflowers, too. She carried it around all day, to and from the icebreaker events, activities fairs, class registration, and mandatory substance abuse seminars (that turned out not to be so mandatory). She barely remembered to tote it along from spot to spot, nearly forgetting it several times during the day.And it sat on her increasingly cluttered windowsill, barely remembered and nearly forgotten for a month. It was watered rarely and appreciated even less and as the soil became dry and pebbly and faded, the roots started to wither from the bottom up.
She didn't notice until her first day in her new dorm. She'd been forced to move out of the bubbling, all girls freshman dorm after a disagreement with her roommate got out of hand, through some fault of her own. The new dorm was uglier, older, removed from campus. Hardly any residents had roommates and most were all upperclassmen who'd already made their friends and found their packs. The doors in the hallway were always closed, no one clustered at the ends to gossip or stress or complain or plot. No one drifted down the halls, peeking in on their friends to comment on their music or ask about their day went. She no longer had a roommate to stay up late talking to about boys or the future or the families they'd come from, the things that had happened to them.
Her days were less full and her focus fell to monotonous classwork, annoying professors, and late night reruns that reminded her of a childhood that suddenly seemed easy. Everything was new, but not in the lovely way it had been when she first got to campus. It was new in a way she didn't want to notice or admit, and so she didn't pay much attention to anything. Her grades wavered, her weight grew, and her room cluttered.
She noticed the sunflower dying and found a dirty mug to fill at the water fountain down the hall. She doused the dry, pebbled soil, and flaky white bits rose from it in a cloud and fluttered around at her, like insects, but they were not alive. They fell back into the pot, onto the windowsill, onto the crumb-filled carpet below.
She was disgusted. What a stupid purchase; it had added hardly anything to her life. She threw it in the bin with the rest of her happy, yellow, freshman memories, and there it remained, barely remembered, nearly forgotten.
