”To the normal observer, smiles can be seen as a reflection of happiness. It’s portrayed as the main pioneer in showing happiness, the most simple way to express joy. But there are some of us, who smile in sorrow, in anger, in despair. It’s those kinds of smiles that leave a new sort of meaning. They tell certain stories. It’s those kinds of smiles that you need to look out for. And it’s those kinds of smiles that you need to cherish.”
I’ve got a bouquet full of roses just a few minutes ago. It was not from an admirer, no. Nor was it from my lover. My mother had picked them up from a rose garden she visited this morning, and it was up to me to set them up in a vase to keep in our living room.
It was a meditative process, doing so; with careful fingers tending to each stem before placing them aside. So I hardly noticed when a thorn struck under my nails, and when I met with red-soaked leaves upon a red bed of roses, I was a bit surprised.
The scene did manage to tug out a smile from my lips, gazing at the finger that still kept bleeding, and for a moment, I contemplated how a single drop of it would look on top of the vibrant green leaves, or even one of the petals scattered on the counter. But it wasn’t something I could follow up on. Because to get that amount of blood, just a prickle of thorn wasn’t enough, and I’d look like a madman trying to swipe a knife through my fingers right then. These were experiments best left for my eyes only, as I didn’t want to cause any unusual distress to my already distressed mother. So I swiped off the blood, picked out the leaves and threw them away, wiping the counter clean and then setting the roses aside.
I’ve never been a fan of flowers, if I can be honest. Especially not the ones you could buy at flower shops. To me, something so delicate and beautiful was not meant for the hands of destructive beings like humans. They belonged where they were born in, hidden behind trees and protected by their mothers; something that is not to be touched, but seen. But like everything else, we have this tendency to think that all that is beautiful must be rightfully ours. So the buds from trees now line the vases of countless houses, and offices. We give them away as a token of affection. Love now bloomed from the snatched away buds of creation, and how easily we killed each one by robbing them from their homes.
So yeah, now I have a bouquet of roses in my living room. It looks rather romantic to the naked eye. My mother seems delighted by them at the least. But all I see are just dying stems of recreation, rotting away inside my concrete walls. I doubt I’ll see any bees coming by to harvest nectars, because flowers have long stopped blooming in cities like the ones I live in. But maybe it’s just me who is overthinking this. Everything we have all around us, is just dirt in the end. Things that are born, must also die. So it’s only inevitable. The roses are born to decay; rotting away before turning into dust and mixing with the very ground that gave them birth.
I just realised that I started off writing about smiles in this piece. This was supposed to be an entry where I planned on contemplating how everything that seemed simple, had a vast dimension of complexity within them. But alas! I’ve been struck down by the roses and their dying leaves.
The colour is rather distracting.
They match perfectly with the blood I spilt.
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