The Life & Death of Thirty Seven Roses

On Saturday morning, I water the ashen graveyard. We bury corpses in the ground, but the bones will never grow. I pluck thirty seven roses from around my grandmother’s grave.

 

Lake Michigan’s dock has witnessed many a rose incur the petty torture of “he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not. Not not not.” But nobody will love me, ever ever love me, until I learn to accept every mark and curve pressed into my skin by the whisperings of the world.

 

I begin to bury my body with every other petal of my thirty seven roses, the flowers living and dying in vain of this self that cannot love, a spring blossom that cannot open.  

 

“I love me” (a petal for my shoulder). “I love me not” (a petal for the lake). “I love me, I love me not. Not not not” until I’m wishing that the petals could slip past my pale flesh into the voids between my blanched bones, melt between my organs like the sap of a spring maple leaking to glue my parts back together.

 

But these petals cannot fix me.  They just lay, wistful, with only the will of the windless day holding them to my body. I shake away the blood spill of burgundy petals and walk away (as always). No matter where I turn my footsteps, I always end up walking away like the frosted moon tide. I jump into the lake with the other half of the petals that do not love me.

 

They only love the polka-dotted, paper doll dresses I’d thrown in the fireplace as a child and the swelling of flames and mother’s frowning that ensued. Because what loves me I burn and watch as someone tries to extinguish me.  What loves me I destroy. What loves me I leave behind to join the monsters I’d created myself and wonder why I wake up still fractured and vacant searching for thirty seven more roses and an ounce of cold blooded hope.

 

On Sunday morning, I water the blooming graveyard. We bury corpses in the ground, but the bones will never grow. Thirty seven roses resurrect themselves around my grandmother’s grave.