the aftermath

the girl with the ribbons

Dear:

At this hour your roses die – my roses, the roses you gave me on Valentine’s. From that day to this, I have faithfully changed the water, trimmed the stems, spread the leaves before the sunlight; still they expire, still they fade. I have delayed the moment of their decay. But I know that there will come a time when the soil rises to reclaim what it had borne.

And that is all very well, except my dilemma is not that they die, but that they do not disappear: no earth is thick enough to conceal where they have been buried. No fire can burn them without producing ash. 

So I wonder at how you fit all the weres and might-have-beens into a tiny marble, small enough to be held in the mouth and swallowed, to be rolled under a bed and ignored. I marvel at how we compress ever and always into a snow globe; encircled by heavy glass, the memories refuse to be run through a second time, and I am forbidden from whispering some worthless wisdom into the ears of past innocence. Hindsight now fogs up on its glossy exterior, not reaching the moment frozen in time, a time we have tried to separate from our reality, a time when I did not know the possibility of such loss.

I promised that we’d still be good friends, but how do you go from loving someone like that to being just friends again? How do you sweep a dust storm under the rug? I presume that the girl you’ll bring home one day will not be quite so comfortable with the idea of me. Do we swallow that marble, roll it under the bed, and let her swim unknowingly above the undercurrents of such a wrangled history? Or do we part, at her request? Is it fair for you to break the promise if I was the one who made it?

And now I see her sitting on the kitchen couches wearing your arm my arm the arm you gave me long ago. I am standing an unassuming distance away and I am smiling through a grimace and she laughs and twirls your hair the way I used to and you beam down at her the way you beamed at me. How could we tell her? How could we tell her?

And what about me? How do I go from knowing your most intimate secrets and damning insecurities to asking him his favorite ice cream flavor? How many more times must I brave the fall of my heart’s Jericho and bare my soul before another? All the words I learnt in your language, where will they go? How can I start over, how do I wipe the slate clean?

Indeed, the day you bought me those roses I knew you had already come to your decision; there was no apter way of laying me down than when you gave me something destined to die. But you cannot thrust the genie back into his lamp, you cannot take back the words that you said. What has transpired cannot retract it can only perish just like roses do not return to seeds they only wither. And here I am, burying those roses in vain, whose stems and thorns will not be smothered by the dirt. Here I sit, in the midst of a dust storm too wild to be packed into a snow globe, the sands of which spill into every conceivable nook and crevice of my future. You say that there will come a day when everything is okay again, when these unhappy things cease to affect every aspect of my existence so deeply. But that day is beyond the current reach of my imagination.

With all the love of a thousand bindweeds,