𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: "To the Red Rose Who Wept on My Garden" by Mary Elizabeth Luzon

 

Published by: Irene Alga

Date Published:  September 29, 2023

Time Published: 10:15 AM

Category: Prose

Subject: Misplaced trust

The rose wept blood onto the garden I grew—its thorn turned the sky blue and yet I could not have pluck it. On the soil it sat, waving even just a tad. The sun already set and yet it left no depth between the garden’s life and death. It formed a bridge of tar-black land onto the gleam of an empty sea. The rose ruined what I’ve ascended. The rose ruined what I’ve been gifted. Gifted of life in the night full of a sightless sky.

And then the garden died. Died, it did, like the summer flame in touch with the winter ice; a horror to be seen when its molten self distorts beyond all sense of itself. And I wished it was not death that it, my garden, met. I wished it, my garden, lived until it saw what was once the speck of the sun transform into the ablaze planet that it could have touched. Yet it died, died, died—it died. To the garden I wished could have stood when I, myself, was planted to its feet.

The rose wept onto the garden I grew—I planted it as a centrepiece, I planted it as it spoke with the last ink on my memo. I should have disregarded it. I should have let it wrinkle. Now, what I thought was hope became the end of what I had made. Of the passion that I grew into, the passion I let overflower. Perhaps, I was blind-sighted. The red reminded me of passion, unbeknownst to me it was the passion to sight tragedy. It was that I trusted it to become its best self when its nature was that it would wither. It would simply wither. It simply withered and took the garden with it. It took my heart with it.

So I stand in the ruins of my nature, the ruins that I myself, thought I had nurtured.