I place the rose down and like how it reminds me of you, how it always reminds me of you. Not just because it was your favourite flower, not just because of the literal references; how I connect it to instances of you – the smell of you after a shower or the colour on your cheeks in the cold. The rose is where your memory survives.
Today is a wet one. I stand here in my mac, trousers slowly becoming skin, and rain like a gauze sutures my face to the elements. I breathe in the ozone of storm, the freshness of grass disturbed by rain and feet, and the oppression of low clouds, grey and full of potential.
I like it when it rains at your grave; you always loved to splash in the puddles – and in the plush green of your resting place pools of rainwater await your stomping wellie-filled feet, and will go on waiting. It comforts me to see life here, to know the rain is seeping down through the mud, past life, regenerating, aiming for you. And to see your gravestone glisten as new, like day one. It reassures the permanence of you.
This is you now. You beat me to it. One day we will both be grass and mud, soil-fodder and feed for growth, but you will be first. You wait for me in the science of change.
The rose is a representation of what you were and what you will become.
The stem supports the flower, it is a vessel for all the things that keep it beautiful; dripping with rain, propped against your gravestone, it holds the head high as it collects with a sheltered gentility, mists of rain within its folds, its bright red folds – curtains of blood shot with the entreating vortex of infinity. Like you were, it is complex and has, upon detailed inspection, whirls of blood, deepening into itself, too much for my eye, too much for me to ever know.
Past roses, in varying states of failure, like limp sentinels or ghosts of sentinels, rest beside your gravestone. I asked for the roses to be kept, so that one day you would be with what was once a rose and once held by me, all soil and worm-meat.
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