“I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words” (Fitzgerald 14).
Her petals float through the moonlight, carried by the light breeze, in the immaculate garden. Her red velvet folds hold poise and virtue in their subtleties, creased but not damaged in the slightest. Her maroon hue makes the surrounding environment blush with envious prose spilling from their unfastened mouths, unzipping at the mere sight of her.
Her presence is a luxury, an indulgence, a statement of opulence without a single murmur of corroboration needed.
Every light in the city shines for her and her only; the people crowd around their light switches, waiting for the moment of truth when her crimson demeanor is most susceptible to their praise.
The sun only evades the cloud’s defense when it hears rumors of her appearance, ensuring every ray is in its position and each golden beam is prepared.
Any who declare themselves cynical of this verity must have never experienced her. One moment of basking in her ruby company is enough for the doubts to drift away, for the fears to fade, for the worries to withdraw.
Once you look, you can’t look away.
And, almost no one wants to.
Almost.
With every fact of life comes its hollering exceptions, yearning for recognition and companionship that dim the feeling of insanity.
The rose brings both apathy and apprehension to all whose loving gaze is locked on her. Aesthetes and admirers throw bouquets onto the ground she saunters across.
The exception scoffs at the amateurs. He’s done it all already; he’s eulogized her, he’s serenaded her, he’s poured his passions into their amour. And in return?
His time-stained view of her has retraced into pure disgust—but, disgust doesn’t exist without a hint of attachment.
This attachment isn’t casual; it was once an all-consuming devotion that ruined a man’s life. Devotion to the good and the evil of it all, devotion to every last foreboding petal, devotion to the entrancingly sinister thorns.
Her thorns seemed to be an anomaly, swerving off the path of the natural connotation. They converted every fact he had ever heard into an unadorned suggestion. Their allure knew no boundaries, eternally impaling the so-called impenetrable.
Suddenly, his wonders were untouchable yet so worn, so intangible yet so tattered. He became a threadbare tapestry shredded by the violent grip of a rose’s thorns.
Rust has grown on the passion he used to love her with, but if he could do it all over again, I like to think he would.
Because, through all of the dreams he held in his now-dying grasp, she was the only one who mattered.
“He must have looked up at the unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass” (Fitzgerald 155).
