After the Rose

Spring couldn’t get enough of freshness. All of the flowers were glowing. In the meantime, I was a flower at the age of seven, and I was like that like all the children were.

I was right at the heart of nature in the garden of the single-story house of my grandfather. That place had everything. Dreams were chatting with the reality. It was like heaven. A heaven on earth…You would make friends with bugs, dogs, cats; you would play with the grass… Soil and water… Now I understand they were making love in ecstasy. They would have a heart-to-heart talk.

Do you know what that garden meant to me? I cannot find the words right now. I can say that it was a part of mine, my all. It was my memories, my future, my past, like I said, my dreams and my reality.

That garden had flowers. All belonged to me… Yet, there was just one with pink leaves. It was a rose… Yet, it was just a small bud a short while ago. Just a single rose that I watered with my own hands… How lively it was, more beautiful than all roses. Its leaves were like a velvet shining bright. Its thorn would joke around with me. This was the way it was a part of mine. The first thing I did in the morning was to visit that rose. To smell it, to love it. Who knows, maybe it was the realization of my existence. It was the dance with life through that small soul of mine.

But everything was going to change one day. Oh God, how terrible it was! The thing in the hands of that black-veiled woman was my rose itself… It was cut off. It was dead. It didn’t exist anymore. This was how the tiny world of mine was going to witness a murder, be devastated, be crumpled, be grieved, cry over and over again with a broken hearth and shattered dreams. I don’t know if I could tell how I feel if I said even now my eyes are getting wet.

I felt the same way when my rose was cut off, just like the way I would have felt if that lovely old, lonely pine tree, which used to greet all vehicles passing by in that town, had been cut.

Oh, my dear grandmother.. She understood how I felt, she felt for me, but it was too late. That said, the sadness in her eyes, the deep sympathy would relieve my soul a little, but I lost a friend, a lover, a buddy… It was gone. It was killed to be given as a present. It was a murder. It was an unexpected loss…A mourning that affects me even this day, after half a century…

This is how nature and children were. I’m sure all children, each of us, must have a story like this…

How do I know that? Like the poet said, You keep chasing friends, yet the only one to find is the dark soil… Then you articulate the most delicate moments of those beautiful souls that each and every one of us keeps at the deepest point

I don’t know, I want to say that may God never let anyone see those breakups… It is understood that we must think at every step we take… What are the souls we interact with? We have to know, we have to feel.

But this is where the words fail, if you like beauty and dead flowers…