Nesting Crowns

Esha always wore her hair in elaborate braids. Sometimes she wove marigolds through the coarse strands. They looked like tiny suns bursting forth from the darkness - solar systems nestled in her locks. 

Esha made me feel like anything could happen. Her eyes were bulbous green globes. Her limbs were bolts of electricity. My mother called Esha a force of nature. We were too young to understand what that meant, but we loved it anyway.

The flowers wouldn't stay put in my hair like they did in hers. Esha's locks were sturdy. Her braids were woven thick like the ancient tapestry we'd seen at the museum in fifth grade. My hair was stringy. Petals slid through my strands like gentle rain. I was always left disappointed.

For a short while, I used hair pins to secure them. That just turned the whole thing into a metallic mess. It was not the meadow goddess look I was going for. Eventually I decided to give up.

Esha frowned when I explained this to her. The next day, she made me my first flower crown. It was a delicate twiggy thing, stuffed with honeysuckle and lilac. It smelled like heaven.

"I love this!" The words gushed forth in an uncontrollable burst. I tested the crown's heft with both hands. "It's like a bird's nest, but made by a fancy florist, or a magic fairy, or..." My sentence lost its way, so I hugged her instead.

Esha beamed. "I always thought of them as my little birds," she said, touching her own marigolds. "Now you have a nest of your own!"

Esha and I spent our teen years intertwined, but always pointing in different directions. Esha went on wilderness retreats. She studied abroad. She spent her weekends surfing and her nights sneaking out to bonfires.

The flowers in her hair changed. They came and went, waning and waxing, a natural process. I envied the way she didn't care when her marigolds fell out.

I tried on lots of names and faces in those years. It's something teens do - leaving piles of jeans on the dressing room floor before finding the perfect fit. Mine was hundreds high.

One time, in a fevered haze of Nyquil, I dreamed that I was Esha. I woke up in her skin, and she in mine. It felt like the floor gave way under me. I bolted upright up in a panic, calming only when I found my bearings in my own bedroom.

I bet Esha dreamed she was flying that night.

It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling. I spent most of my teen years grasping desperately for something to hold on to. Maybe it was my parents' divorce. Maybe it was the fact that we moved houses twice. 

Maybe, like my hair, my ephemeral sense of identity was just part of the life I was dealt.

I got too attached to my boyfriends. I searched obsessively for scholarships and stable jobs. I went to church. I volunteered. I did yoga.

None of those things made me feel grounded quite like making flower crowns with Esha did. I liked the roundness of their gentle weight, the mild sense of pressure on my head.

Esha went on to earn degrees in political science and environmental engineering. She wanted to save the world, quite literally. When I last heard from her, she was headed to Costa Rica to do just that.

We slowly lost touch in the whirl of our twenties. I fell out just like the flowers in her hair. She's not on social media.

I still spend my life searching for perfect twigs and constructing flower crowns. I fill them with blooms from my own garden. My poppy and hibiscus plants are grown with great love and a firm sense of purpose. I've never learned to master marigolds.

Our local wedding and photography circuits love my creations. I was even once featured in Vogue.

Esha doesn't follow any of that, though. Why would she? Her nest grows straight out of her head, ever ready to collect exotic birds as they fly by. 

I like to think Esha's as free as she ever was. I wish I knew what that meant to her now.