Stasis

We bought three bunches of statice on Sunday morning at Columbia Road Market.

Flower-sellers shouting like in My Fair Lady. Throwing their voices hoping that we will throw our money back. A boy being trained up by his parents long in the trade. He is loudest by far. Me with my camera, photographs of petal clashes, views down stalls, two friends outside Wes-Anderson-New-York-style buildings with stoops. Looking out the window of the second floor of a second-hand bookshop, reading blurbs to a backdrop of 'twenty stems for a fiver!'. Discussing and lusting over sweetpeas, a term of endearment I often use, smelling yummy and reminding her of oysters in bonnets. Wandering on to Broadway Market for chai tea lattes and the Observer and being told off for sitting too far out into the street on unstable chair legs.

We buy three bunches of statice, though I want a thousand. A whole sea of statice, blues and purples, with little splashes of yellow like tiny fish fins. At first I hear it as 'stasis'. Stability. Not a word I have been applying to times of late. But this is a suspended moment. Staring into statice.

Split between two vases on our freshly table-clothed kitchen table, it looks as though we picked our flowers out in the field only that morning.