Forever Blooming by Taylor L. W. Ross
Not losing her virginity until college made Laura a “late bloomer.” She had wanted to wait for love, but while this was something she could say in high school and receive knowing, perhaps even envious looks from her girlfriends, in college her new friends’ faces held dubious and sometimes superior expressions. The v-card was no longer precious. Instead, it increasingly signified something wrong. The longer she had it, the more suspicion emerged. Didn’t anybody want her?
Dark red blood bloomed over white cotton when Laura was twelve, and she was the first of her friends to need a training bra. Blossoming early. Perhaps the extended distance between becoming a woman and becoming a woman made the second destination feel further away.
Her developing body gathered up cautions like wildflowers being collected for a bouquet, only her bouquet was not so pretty.
Careful, or you’ll end up with my hips. This from her white mother, eyeing her Asian aunts, thin as a chopsticks, with envy.
Careful, he has a crush on you, but it’s only yellow fever! From friends who were just looking out for her, while braiding each other’s hair at recess. Praising her thick black locks, they bemoaned their own thin dirty-blond strands, and Laura felt a warm curl in her stomach.
Careful, if you’re too mean, no one will like you. From her father, who yelled at buyers over his home office phone in a voice that sent her cowering and admonished her for attitudes anything less than bubbly while his business grew.
When your body blossoms, the expectations unfurl. The contradictions of womanhood.
Want it.
But not too much.
Be confident.
But not too much.
Her first college boyfriend was obsessed with her, and everyone said this was a good
Thing. At dinner one evening, he accused her of flirting when she asked the waiter which dish he recommended.
“You wouldn’t smile like that for a waitress,” he said.
Perhaps she had been smiling too wide?
The blooming onion the waiter suggested had been cut, battered, deep-fried, an onion masquerading as a flower.
Her boyfriend wouldn’t touch it. He sat back in his chair, his disgust over her behavior evident in every hard line of his body.
Maybe he thought making her eat it by herself a punishment, but she savored onion rings and thus every bite of the onion bloom, whatever it pretended to be.
When she was five visiting her grandparents, her father told her to hug her grandfather in greeting out of respect. Though he was old and sick and smelly, and scary besides. Every word from his mouth the commands of a Chinese emperor. Her every expression of joy quashed, a rebellion unladylike, disrespectful, unacceptable.
She learned to tamp down the discomfort in her body, instead embracing him again and again.
When the cancer got him, it was a relief.
But she had already learned to be small.
No longer opening but curling inward. Petals wilted.
The boyfriend threatened her. Threatened himself. Blamed her for both.
Got violent. Was too good at repair.
The fear, she began to see, was the same.
She began to track back, to notice every time over the course of her life when she’d been told, Give me what I want, even if it means sacrificing you.
And she had said, Okay.
Now, single again, she chooses herself in little ways. She is learning to say, No.When her girlfriends say, “C’mon, just one more drink,” despite her early morning
interview for a highly competitive internship.When her mother says she must attend family Thanksgiving, or the aunts will call her selfish.When the guy from Hinge pressures her to go rock climbing, chiding her for not getting
out of her comfort zone.
Maybe these no’s are not so little.
Some days it is harder than giving in. Harder to say yes to herself than to please others.
Most days.
It is two steps forward and one step back. It is an opening and a closing. The flower blooms and recedes, curls and opens.
The places in her life where she must learn to prioritize herself seem endless.
Self-discovery is like peeling back the layers of an onion one at a time, only she’ll never get to the center.
At every layer, she thinks:
Dammit, I am here again. This is me. Again.
Here is another sacrifice. Another example of how much more I have to learn. How much more there is to go.
This is who she’s always been.
But maybe—this does not have to be who she is.
Like an onion, she is stinking, raw, and delicious.
She is cut, battered, and deep-fried too.
Flower and onion both, she is forever blooming.