Roses in the dark

I had a new home! I had wondered what it would be like to be picked up by one of the strange creatures that came and looked at us every day and be taken away. Many of my siblings had gone in the last couple of days, and my turn had finally arrived. I had been gently laid on a weird vehicle that moved underneath me until we had reached tall looking towers. Finally, we arrived at a small and somewhat dark place.

"Hey Hannah, how are you feeling?", said the creature who had picked me up to another. This other creature looked different, like she wasn't very full of life or hadn't spent enough time in the sun. "I brought you a baby rose, isn't it pretty?", said the first creature, moving me forward towards the Hannah-creature. 

The Hannah-creature stepped forward and took me reluctantly, but not like she didn't like me, but more like she was afraid. 

"Huh, yeah, it's a beautiful rose", she mumbled. Emotion didn't seem to coat her voice as much as the other creature. She did smile, but it didn't reach Hannah's eyes like it did his when he saw her. "I'm not a plant person though, I don't know how safe it will be with me".

"It will be all right, you just have to water it every other day and keep it by your window. It is not too hard to take care of. Want to have it keep you company? You can just keep it these three weeks while I'm back, and I can take it then if you want." The male creature was overly cheerful. It sounded almost as if he tried to compensate for Hannah's somber tone with his. 

She looked up at him and brightened her face slightly before saying, "sure, we'll be roommates while you are away". He seemed convinced, but her hands were slightly trembling as they held my pot. 

"All right, I'm off then, see you in a few", he told her hesitantly and leaned in and placed his face next to hers. "Take care, I'll call as often as I can". He appeared to be uneasy about leaving, but closed the door and departed anyways. It was just the Hannah-creature and me now. 

My new home was a little dark, filled with things, and not very organized. I couldn't see much of it at first, because Hannah stayed standing and staring at the closed door for a while before moving again. 

"Okay plant, we just have to get past three weeks on our own. I'm not very good at taking care of anything, but I will try my best. You are quite pretty, yellow has always been my favorite color." She placed me by a window where I could receive light. I liked my new home, and I liked Hannah. 

After she placed me, she went and laid down, covering her body with a thick cover. She didn't stand up until the next day, even though I got to enjoy the sunlight for several hours more. I came to notice she did this often. She would rise in the morning, drink something dark that didn't look like water, put a little food in her mouth, and, most of the time, return to her hiding spot underneath the thick cover. She also spent a lot of sunlight time drinking something yellow, and sometimes she would drink it late into the night, hours, and hours after the sun was gone. 

On the first days, she was very good at giving me water. She even cleaned my leaves and somedays spent time sitting close to me, looking out the window. We would stay there looking outside, although she shied away from the light, unlike me. Every time she came near, I tried my best to look nice, trying to get my petals to cheer her up. Sometimes it seemed to work. But as the sun came up and down, she moved less and less and drank more and more of the yellow liquid.

One day she missed my water dose. She hadn't stirred or noticed the yellow liquid spilled on the floor. I didn't like the yellow liquid. Although it seemed to make her feel better at first, it also made her clumsy, and many times it made water come out of her eyes for hours. The liquid seemed to wither her, and it made her avoid light even more; it couldn't be good water if it chased life away.  

"Aren't you lucky, Rosie?" she asked when she finally came close. "I don't think you feel empty like I do. I try to do things, but I don't remember why I used to do them before. I can't read anymore, I used to love it. But now I can't concentrate. The pages draw out forever, and I can't relate to the stories anymore. Everything hurts. Everything is far or difficult. Food doesn't taste the same. I just want to sleep. Sleep helps me not feel anything, and that's nice, you know? Would you mind if we close the curtain for a while to see if we can sleep?". So she closed it. She never opened it again. 

That night she stood up again, long after the sun had gone. She stumbled until she found more of the yellow liquid and sat by the window. She gazed out listlessly, drops of water tumbling down her face now and then. She kept drinking and drinking and drinking until she drifted off with her head close to me. I looked over her until the sun came out, hoping she would open the curtain and eat something the next day. 

But she didn't open the curtain. And when she did eat, she ran to the little room she frequented and stayed there for a very long time. Time slurred away, and she forgot my water ration repeatedly. The draught had my leaves struggling to remain upright, and the lack of sunlight made it hard for me to feed. I was wilting slowly, like she was, growing weaker and wearier with each passing sun-lit cycle. 

One night, she poured some of the yellow liquid on me. I think she thought it was water. She had many glasses laying around with either water or yellow poison, which were impossible to distinguish in the dark. It burned and sucked away more moisture. My leaves started to darken and become stiff. 

It became hard to know when the sun came up, and we both seemed to be shutting down further as time kept traversing. She would rarely move, only going to the little room, occasionally to eat something, and she answered a machine that made noise sometimes. She watered me once after many, many days, but I could feel that it was too late. It revived me some, but I was too dry and sun-deprived to regain much strength.

My petals fell, dry and wilted, no longer yellow but a stale shade of brown. My leaves wrinkled, and my stem became rigid and dry. She became paler, thinner, darker circles around her eyes. Everything about her lost the little luster it had had before, and she became increasingly more lethargic. I hoped we would make it, but it started to feel like we would not. I hoped the first creature would at least come to water Hannah before it was too late for her.

As the last of my petals plummeted to the ground, and I lost the last green bit of my stem, I felt movement outside. The other creature seemed to be back. 

"Hannah?", he called, trying to make his way through the darkness. "I'm finally back, it took more time, as I tried to tell you on the phone. Where are you? Are you all right?". His tone was overly cheerful again, with a tinge of panic. He came nearer to the bed, trying to ignore the manifest disarray of things. "So, did you water your plant?"