No Favorites

I am starting to think my inability to pick a favorite flower might be a symptom of a bigger disease.

Not a cute “haha I’m so indecisive” one.

More like a spiritual infection.

My soul has commitment issues and my body is collateral on this lease of life.

Everyone else seems to have a favorite something. They say it so casually.

“My favorite color is blue.”

“My favorite city is Paris.”

“My favorite flower is roses.”

They say it the way people say I love you when they still believe it means forever.

I open my mouth to answer and twenty versions of me start talking at once. The girl in the motel bathroom with wet hair and cheap champagne in her bloodstream says lilies. The one in the church dress with smudged mascara says white roses. The dead-eyed version from the shower, rinsing other people’s fingerprints off her skin, says nothing at all. I can’t pick a favorite because I don’t know which one of us gets to choose. Maybe none of us do.

I think about lilies in nice hotel rooms. Casablanca lilies, loud and white and erotic in their softness, smelling like sex and funerals and the kind of Catholic guilt that never actually stopped me from doing anything sinful.

They are the flowers of the woman who shows up already knowing she is the moment. She knows everything, and does it all right. They are the flower of “God is watching and I hope He’s writing this all down.” They are the flower of “if this is a sin, then let’s make it worth it.”

Peonies feel like someone else’s life. Some small girl who was raised with good decisions and linen sheets and her parents loved each other and she never learned to stop dreaming.

Soft, layered, expensive, perfect.

I can wear that life for a day like a dress, but it never zips all the way up.

Tulips are cities I haven’t moved to yet. French tulips that arch over the vase like they’re dancing to a song I can’t hear. They’re always in the photos of the woman I could be if I stopped burning every chapter as soon as it got interesting.

How am I supposed to choose between the lives I’ll never live?

How am I supposed to say “this one is my favorite” when half of me is still standing in a dark bar in another state trying to remember which name I gave the man who is buying the next drink?

I want to blame it on aesthetics, pretend this is just about taste and not about the fact that my identity feels like a movie whose scenes got shuffled out of order.

But it’s never just the flower, is it…

I don’t have a favorite color because some nights I am red, bruised, loud, sinful, a stop light that doesn’t actually work, and some mornings I am gray, flat, fog, a ghost pressed against a window.

I don’t have a favorite song because every lover rewires my nervous system and suddenly the song that once saved me now reminds me exactly how I died.

I don’t have a favorite food because my appetite keeps changing with the way my eyes open that day.

I do not stay the same, so why would my favorites?

There is a strange morality attached to knowing yourself. You’re supposed to be able to answer questions like “what’s your favorite” and “where do you see yourself in five years” and “what kind of person are you.”

I don’t know what kind of person I am. I just know what kind of person I’ve had to be. The body that was for sale. The body in the shower. The body on the plane. The body in the motel. The body in the mirror looking back like a stranger who knows too much.

How do you pick a favorite anything when your own body has been repurposed so many times?

Favorites imply joy, and I’m still untangling which decisions were mine and which were just a performance that kept me alive.

There are nights I look at myself in the bathroom mirror under that cruel, fluorescent lighting and I can’t tell if I’m getting ready or being prepared for sacrifice. Liner, lipstick, lace. Holy oil, holy wine, holy waistline.

Sometimes, I imagine an angel lighting a cigarette and saying, “She’s doing it again.”

It gets all messed up in my head when I try to decide. All of my options come flooding in and somehow wipe my mind clean of anything at the same time.

I imagine God as a bored director sitting in a black folding chair, watching me pace between outfits like:

“Well? Are you the good girl or the ruined one today? Are you the muse or the monster?”

And I keep answering, “Honestly, yes,” and changing my lipstick.

There is a temple inside me where saints and whores drink from the same glass. Where nuns wear my lingerie under their habits and angels barge into motel rooms with clipboards asking if I’ve finally picked a favorite scent, a favorite sin, a favorite version of myself that I plan on keeping.

I tell them I’m still in wardrobe, the scene changed, I’m waiting for better lighting.

Fuck it.

If the heavens want consistency, they can cast someone else.

Sex complicates everything, of course.

Try picking a favorite anything when your body has been currency, confession, weapon,,punchline, altar, stage prop, and ghost all in the same year.

There are men who would tell you they knew me because they knew what my body did in the dark. There are artists who think they’ve captured me because they caught my profile in the right light. There are admirers who swear they see my soul because they saw my skin through a screen.

They don’t know shit.

They don’t know the girl who stares at the shower wall replaying every “yes” that was actually survival. They don’t know the way my body leaves without me when something feels too familiar. They don’t know how often I’ve turned life into theater just to keep myself from disappearing.

How do you pick a favorite pleasure when half of them feel like flashbacks with better lighting?

Sometimes I pretend my favorite thing is nothing at all.

No touch, no taste, no sound. Just water. Just the hum of the bathroom fan. Just me, heart still beating, not for sale. Other times I want to devour the world to prove I’m still here.

That’s the difficult part, I guess, the swinging between “none of this matters, why bother” and “if I don’t feel everything, I might as well be dead.”

People love to say “you’re allowed to change.”They put it on tote bags and Instagram stories and call it growth. But they still want you to have a brand. They still want your change to be coherent and inspiring and marketable. They want eras they can understand, not a girl who burns the script halfway through the scene and starts speaking a different language.

I just want to be beautiful error in the system. A 404 message. A tv screen full of snow. Just the hum of your lightbulb you probably need to change.

Picking a favorite feels like signing a cosmic contract in eyeliner and blood: “I am this kind of girl.”

What happens if I change my mind tomorrow? Do I get sued for false advertising?

Sometimes I wonder if my favorite thing is the not knowing itself. The way my life keeps unfolding like a crappy film with too many jump cuts between hotel hallways and airport bathrooms and rental cars and green rooms and grocery aisles at 12:01 am.

The girl in each frame is me, kind of, but also not. She is a future that already passed before it got here. She is a dead end that looked like an open doorway. She is a maybe that never grew into a yes. I think about her often, all those dead versions of me. Maybe that’s the real reason I can’t pick a favorite. It feels disloyal to them.

What if the girl I was at twenty loved sunflowers and I just abandoned her for lilies because they look better in photos? What if the girl I was last winter needed gray and I keep forcing gold on her because it fits the narrative better? What if the girl in the shower, who died that day and still somehow walked out, needed the dignity of silence and I keep dressing her wounds in aesthetic captions and bouncy reels?

Maybe the only honest favorite I have is reinvention. Resurrection?

Even that feels dramatic and overused.

Will there be a day where I can answer easily? Where someone asks “what’s your favorite flower” and I say “lilies!” and don’t feel like I just lied to a jury?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Maybe I don’t want a life that can be summed up in one color, one city, one song, one man, one flower. Maybe I don’t want to declare a favorite and then spend the rest of my days trying to live up to it.

If I ever choose, I hope it’s not because I get tired. I hope it’s because something finally proves itself worthy of living with every version of me.