He stands with elegance, hands moving carefully around the soft petals of the flowers he cared for so gently as if he held a child in his hands. Even as people walked into the flower shop, his eyes remained focused on his task. It wasn’t until a woman standing before him called him that he lifted his head, hands leaving the flowers. His eyes soften and he smiles at the woman.

He listens as she speaks to him, a warm smile resting on his face. He nods along to her words then speaks, gesturing towards the bouquet that’d been sitting beside him on a wooden stool behind the front desk. She smiles politely and takes the bouquet in her arms as she pays for the flowers. She then bids him goodbye and exits the flower shop, leaving him alone once again.

It’s a routine. Every day, he takes care of the flowers as if they were the most important thing in the world, helps customers find a satisfactory bouquet, and watches them leave before he goes back to going back to his task. Every day, over and over again, from the opening hours to the closing hours.

And every day, I watch him from the sidelines, observing his every move and writing them down as if he were the most interesting thing I’ve come across.

He’s in his own world, inside the flower shop. A perfect world with perfect people and perfect flowers. It’s a world that was never meant for the flawed, the broken, the weak—a world that wasn’t meant for me.

He, however, blends perfectly with that world. He was born to live there and stay there. He was born perfect, just like the blood-red roses he cares so gently for.

I wonder if our worlds would ever collide—the flawed meets the flawless. I wonder what were to happen if my persona were to taint his world, ruin it with my sole existence.

I wonder.