Roses

There were roses everywhere.

Roses littered a dirt road and damp grass; were held in shaking hands; dropped into a hole in the wet earth with no one thinking about how they would just die and shrivel up soon enough: Death accompanying the dead. 

Around me, rational thought did not exist: tears dripped down flushed faces and caught like wildfire as they leaped from cheek to cheek, sending a hailstorm of droplets from the sky as the ground bathed in the salty onslaught. 

I couldn't bear being here a moment longer, but as my eyes drifted among these sad faces, I remembered my place among these mourners: I was here because I had to be and not being here would be a disgrace and horrific embarrassment. I mean, I guess if your husband dies, you have to attend his funeral or it looks disrespectful, no matter what you feel inside, no matter if the simple act of being here made you want to throw yourself into a coffin of your own.

Soon every last person but me had placed their rose in the seven feet wide six feet deep hole in the earth. I wanted to stay glued where I was in the back, but I cracked the dried paste around my shoes and stepped forward, pushing past pitiful gazes and heavy sighs. 

Thorns threatened to tear my skin and spill my heart and soul. Blood pooled around my feet and leaked out of me to gather beside a wooden box, but I quickly gathered what I could and stuffed cupfuls into my pockets. 

Closing my eyes, I could feel the wind brush my back, lift my hair, whisper, "everything is going to be alright". It was a lie, but even so I raised my hand and dropped the rose into the hole and watched it bounce and settle atop a green and red hill that had gathered atop shiny oak.

Wasn't it enough that I had to go home to an empty house? Wasn't it enough that flowers, roses, were ruined forever? Wasn't it enough that I had to play the quiet, respectfully grieving wife for an audience I cared nothing for? I wanted to rage, to scream at the sky and curse the sun for shining and the birds for singing and wanted to break things: throw china across a room and watch as it smashed into a million tiny, irreparable pieces. 

But a gag had been stuffed into my mouth, strings had been sewn onto my limbs, my jaw, and I could not speak, could not run.

Someone was touching my shoulder, pulling me back from the deep dark hole of Death before me. A woman, my mother, attempted to pick up pieces of me that were beginning to drop. My lungs had fallen out over there, and here, my heart here, now on the ground. 

The blood in my pockets was spilling over, and she scooped much of that mess up too, carrying all of my shattered self in her arms as she guided me away from the crowd that was now moving towards the church, towards a new world that was void of happiness. 

My cheeks felt wet, but I wasn't crying.

As my mother sat me on a bench not far from the gravesite and filled me up with the things that had fallen out of me, the overwhelming smell of fresh flowers filled my nose and I wanted to throw it all back up. This woman wrapped her arms around me and told me everything would be alright, that I didn't need to be upset because Sam would have wanted me to be happy, but I couldn't breathe. It was all lies, all of it and around the bench she had sat me on: tulips, daisies, roses were lining the headstones in front of us, behind us, like a colorful, haunting circle, and the aroma of the fresh pedals was too much, it was all too much and that's all it took. 

I ripped away from an embrace that had comforted me 25 years of my life and ran, far away from Death, from the people, from the roses. Suddenly the gag fell from my mouth, the strings snapped and flew with the wind. 

I went where my feet took me. I looked not at the horizon but at the earth, looked at whatever was in front of me, not ahead, because right then I couldn't imagine a future, only a now, and even now had seemed blurry and surreal.

My legs gave out twenty minutes later. Heels in shoes too tight developed blisters and my breath was freezing before me and I had run out of graveyard to escape from and now I stood on the precipice to the highway.

I looked left and right, the wind with me again, lifting my arms and pulling me with it. I wanted just to fly away. To disappear. To cease existing and no longer feel this bloody pain in my chest. 

I took a step forward. 

Out in the country, the only building being a decades-old funeral home, the only people that came this way were truck drivers and the occasional traveler, and so I did not look both ways.

I took another step forward. 

What if

What if 

What if what if what if

The wind was pulling me again, but this time it was soothing, gentle, soft. Something brushed my foot.

A single rose, crisp, delicate, crimson red, lay next to my shoe. I couldn't feel my body as it bent to pick it up and cradle it in my trembling hands. My vision was blurred, but I couldn't blink, couldn't look away from this wretched thing, not even as I heard a rumbling beginning to grow louder and louder behind me. My feet stood planted between cracks in the earth filled with concrete and rubber and weeds.

My hands hurt, my eyes hurt, my chest hurt, my heart hurt, my lungs hurt; every breath was taxing, every movement painful in some way.

A horn honked, my ears went deaf, but my feet moved, and then I was on the ground, panting, sobbing, as a rose sat beside my fallen body and a truck went flying by on the road. 

As I cried into the grass, I mourned for all that I had lost, for all that the cruel things in this world had taken from innocent people, and my tears watered a garden of roses, deep and dark and fresh and hopeful until—

There were roses everywhere.