beyond the call of duty, last nite heather and andrea dismissed our plans and showed up at my dorm bearing bags of chocolate and diet coke, and a 6-pack of Kleenex. we assumed positions for another tea party and talked and laughed. they left after a while, and i, distracted and comforted, went to sleep.
the situation had been rather strange before they arrived. in shock i cleaned and cried, came down to the computer lab to correspond with my mother and called my dad. sapna, my suitemate, had invited people over, for which she kept apologizing. at one point while i was sitting on my immaculately made bed one of the guy from the other room came in and extended me a tulip. a long-winded explanation for why he was distributing flowers to strangers later, another guy came in with another tulip. this was more matter-of-fact. "sapna told me your great uncle just died," he said, and as i gripped both tulips he told me that his great aunt just died a week ago from emphysema.

later i made a vase out of an empty bottle half-filled with water and the tulips posed as a centerpiece for our teaparty. they haven't opened yet: like the little red fists of infants, they seem both ferocious and calm. looking at them i remember: amsterdam, the flower market, my brother adam and i wandering there; springtime (how much longer could it wait?); our parade of dutch aupairs passing out wooden shoes and sprinkles and leaving me with a deeply ingrained desire for blonde hair. so many tests of my powers of recollection.