I once fell in love with something I couldn't hold. No, not a human, although that often happens, but a red bougainvillea that grew in front of my grandmother's house.
Maybe you've seen this flower. Its color is bright like an unhealed wound, blooming on thorny branches that seem to have a personal mission to scratch anyone who is too brave. It grows without a care, creeping on fences, on walls, even to the houses of neighbors who don't want it.
"Grandma, why does this bougainvillea stay alive even though it's never watered?" I asked one afternoon, when I had just managed to remove the thorns from my thumb.
Grandma chuckled, as if I had just asked the most stupid thing in the world. "Because it's a stubborn flower. A flower that knows how to survive."
I nodded, trying to understand. But I still didn’t fully understand, and to me, plants were supposed to be tame, like a potted rose that only grows when nurtured with love. This bougainvillea was different. It was wild, stubborn, and somehow always seemed more alive than the other plants around it.
Every dry season, when the others were withering away, it bloomed, flooding the fence with red petals like silk cloth blown by the wind. It was so annoying. I, who was just learning to care for small plants in pots, failed over and over again. My plants withered in a matter of weeks, while the bougainvillea stood tall, proud and invincible.
"You should learn from the bougainvillea," my grandmother said one day, when she saw me upset because the guava tree I had planted wouldn't grow.
"Learn what? Stabbing people with thorns?"
My grandmother laughed again, louder this time. "Learn to have strong roots, to survive even in the driest conditions. Look, it doesn't need much water, doesn't need much attention, but it still blooms."
Ah, how annoying that reality was. The teenager I was at that time didn't want to learn from flowers. I wanted to learn from books, from big cities, from places far from the bougainvillea and my grandmother's house. And that’s what I did. I left.
Years later, after my grandmother was gone and her house was no longer occupied by me, I returned. The bougainvillea was still there. Still growing wild, still bright red, still proud. Maybe it had seen too many departures to care who came and went.
I stood before it, feeling defeated. I, who had once wanted to forget this red bougainvillea, had instead returned to it.
Maybe my grandmother was right. Life is more like a bougainvillea than a potted rose. It is not always beautiful, it often hurts, but that is precisely how it survives.
