It wasn’t the anniversary that bit my neck, that broke open the wounds I hide well under summer dresses and the scant scandals that blister my toes. Not the memories of rooftops and such blue skies, or you and your camera bored by sun. It wasn’t even the photograph of chocolate and sunflowers, the square cake of buttermilk that brought tears to your eyes. When I had expected to be in torrid tantrums. When I bathed in coffee, sipped wine and waited for the wash of wanting to end.
What hurt the most this time, when I was supposed to hold you warm and smoky, feathered with chocolate and cappuccinos we sought out by the park; when I should have bought my millionth tie for you, were the roses in that garden I could not exit. I wonder why I walked inside, the green trellis too familiar, the scent once dreamy but now sour and syrupy in wet air. It was the roses, really, those fat, French flowers you so loved, withered at their stems, sad renditions of all romance and prose. It was the roses of ashen pink, flushed faces gone dry, that made my heart break in the cold of day with my children soft and laughing around me, a decadence of beaming teeth.
It was the roses and then the dreams, not the nightmares that frighten me, that leave me lying in my own arms awake, but the dreams in which you are living; or the dreams, even, in which you are dying but we have days. When I wake up it is days I want; just days for you to know that I need you. Days in which I speak the words I dream, ‘I can’t go on without you.’ In my dreams I ask you how I will survive you but there are no answers on your tongue; you only tell me that I will. And it is because these dreams are mine, not yours, that there are no answers; because I do not know deep inside.
It is only now that I realize moments not yet lived; of babies I cannot throw high enough in the air; I no longer want to write, really. The world is muddled, mute, so much less beautiful than what I saw before.
The flowers then, live, dreary at their deathbeds, make me run. I can walk through the trellis, but breathless and ill, want out of this blooming garden where small lives replace each other, where all vines ripen and rot.
