The Pressed Flower Diary

Worn, yellowed pages crackled underneath the pressure of my hands as I clasped the small book tightly. A petite poppy flower was engraved in chipped gold on the cover and I imagined that long elegant fingers had once held the red diary, and traced the tiny engraving. Then, with the most imperceptible of gestures, I tipped the front cover of the aged diary open. Like a butterfly in flight, wings wide and beautiful the pages smiled up at me in all their glory. Pictures, receipts, and pressed flowers peered at me over the edges of the pages, holding their breath and waiting to be rediscovered. It hummed with the promise of untold stories, the music of a kindred spirit’s wonders and adventures.

Yes. This is precisely what I had come here for.

“I’ll take this one please.” I said, shuffling between stacks of books to the front register. A thin, curly-haired, middle-aged woman with wire-frame glasses peered up from her seat behind the counter, obviously having just been released from the clutches of a good book. She stood, looking a bit scattered as her thoughts visibly cleared away like clouds within her eyes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t catch that, what’d you…?”

The woman froze, eyes locked on the diary in my hands as if she had not only seen a ghost, but one had shaken her hand and asked her to coffee.

“Well, I’ll be darned. Someone finally found it,” she said, looking up at me with surprise plastered across her face. “I haven't seen that book since I was 18 years old.”

“Oh! Is it yours? Did you want it ─”

“No, that’s not what I meant, hun,” she stopped me, and then paused and gave a wistful sigh. “It was my grandmother’s. I read the damn thing about a thousand times when I was younger, but I don’t need it anymore. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

Silence fell for a moment.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. In fact, why don’t you take it. No charge. I think Nana would’ve preferred it that way. She hid it here, you know. Made me promise that I wouldn’t point it out. Not that I knew where it was anyways,” she said with a chuckle. “She told me the right person would find it. The next owner would see it, and wouldn’t disregard it. No, no. Instead, they would know it belonged to them next. ‘Sell it to that person’, she said. I think she really meant for it to be a gift, though. It wouldn’t feel right to take money for it.”

I stared down at the forgotten book. Or, I suppose, it was not forgotten, but remembered. And I realized that maybe it was intended for me after all.

“Thank you, Ms…”

“Stella. No Ms, Just Stella.”

“Thank you, Stella.”

* * *

The book came with me everywhere. It walked with me between classes and sat through boring lectures, waiting to be reopened a my nearest convenience. It came along with me for each car ride and cup of coffee. Pages and pages were filled with stories and pocketed memories. Pictures spilled out of edges, and the woman in them all smiled up at me from wherever she was living at the time.

The amount of adventures the book store owner’s grandmother had been on was overwhelming. Across, countries, seas, and continents, the woman had explored so much, fallen in love with people and a thousand different places. And she wrote in astonishing detail of all that had occurred.

As I read, I daydreamed about the possibilities that could be if only I could leap from the confines of creaking college desks into the beauty of the world. If I had the time, money, and the bravery, I would have trekked to the most scenic castles in Europe, and the coast of all of South America. The most excitement I got was driving to the local book store where I had found my magical book in the first place.

Pages flipped in a frenzy as I sped through the history of a woman I had never even met. And before I had the time to prepare myself for an ending, I was on the last page of the small diary. I couldn’t do much more than blink in shock and sadness. The stories that had allowed me to escape my mundane life had come to an end, and there I was, dumbfounded as I stared at the words of the young woman who had walked me through her grandest whimsies. I was forced to look my reality, the one where my young author was many years passed, in the eyes as I read the final page.

“As I have written, my dear old friend, I have fallen in love in earnest this time, and my belly has grown to such an extent that I will be incapable of exploration quite soon. So I say with a heavy heart, that I must return home at last. I have always imagined that an average life would be quite dull. But as I feel my child growing within me, my love’s hand in mine, I think that perhaps, this may be the most thrilling adventure I have yet to begin.”

Tears welling, I turned the final page, expecting to find the rear end of the diary’s cover. But instead, a note taped neatly to the other side met me with what seemed like the familiar sly smile of its author.

Briefly, all I could do was stare. But after a moment’s pause, I held my breath and slowly removed the note from the place it was adhered.

Hello, friend. Now that you have been acquainted with my story, I hope you do not mind me addressing you as such. I would be pleased if you would view me in much the same way. If you are reading this, as you might have guessed, I have left this beautiful earth that I have had the pleasure to view. I know that my time is coming soon, but I wanted to leave something behind. Perhaps that is selfish, but I needed to know that my legacy would not die completely. So, I leave my greatest treasure to you. Perhaps you have found this note before reading my life’s memories. Perhaps you are the kind to flip to the end of the book. But somehow I doubt that. A knowledge greater than my own tells me that this will land in the perfect hands. It is for this reason that I give the next instructions to you and you alone. Where you found my diary, look again for a small silver knob attached to the floor. Open it, and within you will find a gift, from me to you. Use it wisely.

* * *

My hand ran along the floor between stacks of book, searching for the knob my author had described, as Stella peered over my shoulder from behind.

“Are you sure this is where you found the book last time?” Stella asked nervously.

“I’m absolutely certain,” I said with a smile, though my confidence wavered a little. “I swear it was right─”

My hand thudded softly against something hard and oddly shaped.

“Here! It’s here!”

Stella and I shifted books to the side until a tiny door on the ground was visible. I froze at the sight of it. With the woman who created it being who she was, I could only imagine what might lay behind it.

“Well?,” Stella prompted gently. “Are you gonna open it? It was meant for you after all.”

Slowly, I unlatched the small door. And found two notes taped to the top. The first had a name written on it: Stella in bold, familiar, strokes. The second simply read: My new friend.

I took both notes from the lid, and handed Stella hers. Our eyes met.

"Together?” She asked politely.

I nodded, and we opened our notes together.

Hello again friend. I have left something here for you and my granddaughter, as you may have found. I ask only two things. First, divide it evenly between yourselves. It is intended for you both, whoever you may be. The second is that you use it to go on adventures of your own. Explore. Make no excuses. See the world. You deserve a journey of your own.

“She left $40,000 dollars,” whispered a shell-shocked Stella from behind me. “$20,000 for me and─”

“And $20,000 for me,” I said breathlessly.

We both peered into the little hole in the ground before us, finding piles of money laying in the shadows below. But something else drew my eye as I reached into the hidden space.

A little black journal with a poppy dried and pressed within, beside only a handful of words.

May you store your memories here, my new friend. And when your time comes, may you pass them on to another.