Roses. Cliche at best, and I have mixed feelings about them personally. An iconic scent, color, shape, and connotation. They’re beautiful, and all of my memories about them are happy. I don’t have a single bad memory with roses, but like the plant, their roots reach deeper inside and find the dark but rich emotion to feed on.  

He got me a dozen roses for my birthday. They were gorgeous, crimson red, wrapped in green cellophane and a sweet note of birthday wishes from a loving boyfriend tucked in the center. Three months later he disappeared for six weeks, no cute note or so much as a phone call or a text. When he came back the explanation only served to reaffirm what I had already determined. I was the flower, the pretty but not permanent thing in his life. 

There is a rose bush in my grandmother’s front yard. It blooms every year, pink blossoms that invite the bees to buzz around and land on the soft petals. This spring it’ll be fifteen years that she’s had that rose bush. Fifteen years since it was planted to commemorate the loss of her child to cancer. A gift that was given to her by a fellow mourner who wished to preserve the memory of a life that wilted too soon. I remember the day she got this gift and I stood there with the rest of our family, each of us given a single rose. One by one we stood and approached the open casket. Others watched and wept as we placed our roses inside, atop the still body, to rot and die along with the one who was already gone. 

When I was a child, the apartment building we lived in had a large rose garden surrounding it. I’d play there nearly every day with my friends. The gardener would laugh at us as we hid in the bushes and chased each other around. On Mother’s Day, my father would take me and my siblings out to the garden where we would pick a bouquet of roses for my mother and she would cherish them and preserve the flowers from each year. It wasn’t until the divorce that I found out that the first time, of several times, he cheated on her was Mother’s Day. 

Now I cannot extricate that knowledge and emotional pain that grows like a choking vine around the memories of those flowers. While they all bring a fleeting happiness, they dredge up incredible pain. They’ve been sullied by sin and rotted by death, and yet they’re supposed to symbolize our love. Never did I imagine a plant, especially one of such insignificance as a flower, to embody such complexity and compel so much emotion. I wish it was still just that pretty thing you could gift to someone to show how much you care, but now each flower I see speaks of pain and betrayal and loss. Still, after each cut, the rose bush heals and every year puts forth another flower.