Love Them Like You Will Forever

We were sitting where we had been sitting ever since we were kids, with little hands, with long fingers, and our legs would brush against each other, and we would blush without knowing what it was that we were feeling inside,

and the roses grew around our feet, and crawled up through our ankles, and the thorns dug in but the petals were so soft on our skin, and the fragrance of roses when I’m walking home alone in the evening, I walk by a garden or a florist shop, and the familiar fragrance takes me back to our hiding place, and I need to breathe in deeply, because my lungs feel empty of air when I think of you,

and my mind reminds me that I can’t search for you, and how you exist now only in my memories, and the fragrance of roses, that sat in a bunch beneath our feet, and how your hands curled around the flowers, giving them kisses with wounds on your arms, from their thorns, you always were able to love things that hurt you so bad,

‘how is it,’ I ask you, ‘that you can give so much love to everything you touch?’

And you smiled and said, caressing the petals and leaves of the rose plants, ‘everything in the world is so delicate, if only you could see it like I do, everything in the world needs love, just endless unconditional love, and people don’t know how to give it, how to receive it, how to hold something gently in their palms without crushing it to dust.’

and I wonder to myself, after so many years since you’re gone, who loved you so much that you wanted to give that feeling to everyone else? Or maybe nobody did? And that was your wish all along that nobody should feel like you did.

I buy some rose seeds and plant them in my garden, and I’ll spend my life taking care of them like I could could never take care of you, and I’ll miss you everyday, and try to be like one of those people you hoped existed in the world in order to make it a better place.