I feel like she is sad in this passage. She gets this gut feeling that something is wrong when she gets this phone call. However, she feels relieved but at the same time she also feels guilty. I think her guilt could be that she wants to have Val back in her life but not as a friend, as a partner because we know she is in a abusive relationship and she wants someone to truly love her for her. But she is too scared to open up because she doesn't want to get hurt again.

She is comparing the human body with a flower. She states that the dandelion can tell a lot about a person just by looking at how they live, dies, and what happens after it's gone. She starts this by stating how the human body is made, which is similar to how a flower is made. But the only difference is that the flower doesn't have to take care of it's child. Or even experience pain and hardships. Instead, the flower is represented as the first stages of being born for human. We are created in the beginning and slowly die as we get older.