The Sunflower's Manifesto

 Revenge is sweet, Darling, and I do it especially well.

  I could imagine you funny astounded face when you walked pass the bookstore near your home on that morning. I could picture the anxiety when you murmured my name printed on a newly published book. I could feel your shivering hand when your finger guided through the blurb, a brief summary of what we had been through. Yes Darling, I wrote a book for you. Like all the other authors do, I dedicated it to someone special, you.

  You would find me a benevolent revenger when you read. Your depictions are very nice before the climax, as an understanding sweetie with unlimited capacity of humor and a lively, passionate lover who would charm everyone like how you had bewitched me. Who wouldn’t fall for a caring lover with massive opulence, attractive and charming? I had been a sunflower who couldn’t turn against your radiance and I had be fair on this fact.

  Did you remember the sunflower you had presented to me on our first date? When you said you loved my optimism and the way my smile blossomed for you? I could still recall the vivid illusion when ignorance had overwhelmed me. Your face shimmering under the sun like the dew on the sunflower, while the scent of the flower was whispering sweet words in soft breeze. More than that: The first time your hand clutched on mine, the first kiss, the time when you proposed in our garden full of golden blossom of sunflower. Did you feel painful reading those heart-leaping scenes that are no longer tangible to neither of us? But your agony was incomparable to mine for the emotions had blazed innumerable times in my head before they were written.

  No, you didn’t remember, probably. You lack the patience to review everything again once it was over. So it must be painful to when you were forced to read it, stirring up all your old memories again. This is the first part of my revenge. 

 I knew you would read it despite your impatience. Here comes the second part. You were always the apple in everyone’s eyes. A stain on the perfect red was unacceptable to you in order to hide your rotten core. Few of them knew you were poisoning and dangerous behind your seducing perfect skin. I used to be one of them until I bite into the core to realize you were not equivalent to my fantasy. I skinned down my happy fantasy to reveal your toxicity until all your friends, colleagues and lovers would scorn on your decadence. 

  Dread overwhelmed me to recall these but I was desperate for healing. You caused scars on my flesh, ripped open by the smithereens of our relationship. Healing can only be done when I tore the scars open, picked out the broken glasses before I stitched it up with a pointy pen.

  Seven stitches on my forehead and other wounds: the cuts on my hand, bruises on my limbs, fissure on my rib bone, ache in my heart and disillusionment toward relationships. You were a beast hidden under suit and tie, suffocating people against the wall once you transformed. You could have been the most adorable character among all the romantic fictions, if you didn’t ruin your own character with brutality. The sunflower could have blossomed forever, if you didn’t crash its vase on my head. Love itself the greatest deceiver that masked all the obvious flaws when lovers are blinded by their own illusion and I was no exception.

  You must be furious as you walked pass the bookstore on that day. Crash the display window like how you had crashed me! The glass window does not feel agony like me so no bruises will become the hard evidence of your brutality. Masking your fiery only makes you more a hypocrite when your disguise is shattering like the broken window, letting your true character reveal in front of the public. Friendly remind: you don’t have the right to be angry about this revelation. You owed me an apology and you should trade it with your egoism, which you had valued more than my forgiveness when things could still be fixed.

  Quick reaction. You sued me of libel right after that day though you are not shattering my story but dumping your money into the sea. The most able lawyer couldn’t erase the concrete wounds that you had done to me. The medical reports and the recordings wouldn’t lie. You were making a fool of yourself. Standing against you on the court I will once again feel myself a sunflower welcoming the bright intensity of justice.  

  Even if the court couldn’t bring me justice--You know very well the power of words given your experience in fear tactic. Before publishing the book, I lived under your beastly threats for a year when you tried to silence and drown me with fear. You should have known words could be much more powerful against you when you married a writer. You neglected a typewriter’s power like you neglected my blooming vengeance. The moment you watered it with blood, you nurtured it with vengeance. 

  You thought a sunflower couldn’t live without the radiance of you? I could finally tell the difference between loving and patronizing someone. There are always audience for a flourishing sunflower, someone can’t bare to hurt, someone does not need me spending efforts to write a book about violence and oppression, someone I can end my writing career for.

  Flooding me with false accusation is not saving your slumping reputation. Since the book was published, you lost already. My revenge is done. No more innocent sunflowers will suffer from your heated hell of violence. No more stifled voice under your burning heat. Those who bloodied protect the pure from seven stitches or more. 

  I am looking forward to see you tomorrow and I shall confront you on the court. You shall once again be amazed by my optimism.