Trips to the market force the routine of caring for myself. It is there that I remember how to buy the groceries so, that I can cook the meals, that I must eat so, I don’t perish. I rote learned how to be an adult there and all the vendors have known my family custom for years. I float through streams of people gawking and indecisive. Determined footsteps drag my aching knees. My bones hurt every morning without fail. 

I buy two dozen white roses, the only white ones the flower man has, he discourages the choice. The white garden roses have no scent and their heads show bruises. It’s not about the quality. It’s about what they mean. To speak plainly, I buy white roses to commemorate our death. Or perhaps I’m commemorating many deaths. * NB I have spent more money on flowers than food. This is the true budgeting of the former anorexic and a recovering junkie.

I never keep white roses in the house they remind me of funerals and warm grief. My mother gifted me a bouquet when they released me from the asylum after my accident with the pills. Maybe she foretold the dying of something inside me twelve months later.

Hey little girl, when you let monsters in your bed, well, you know what you did. Your friends show loyalty and kindness. Others wound me with their ‘I told you so advice’. It’s ok to scorn and judge me, I am not glass. I write on water.

It’s supposed to hurt like death. I repeat, ‘grief is love shifting’. I know death. I know how to mourn. I know how to not have the last word – goodbye, I love you, I forgive you, stay dead, I’m sorry, come back, this too shall pass – never, ‘why?’. Never ever ‘why’.

And I praise God for wisdom, no matter how it is given, it is a deliverance from folly. 

I’ve washed my sheets and made the bed fresh and chosen the set with the little floral bouquets that remind me of my mother. I lean on the strength of the word of God as I know she must have. And I feel more a woman than ever, it’s not just the menstruation that has curled me foetal in this timeless chamber-hole. I won’t move. I don’t want to. I wallow and lick my wounds, unwilling to leave my love heart marked cat like his peaceful slumber damns back some of my grief. Again, I am an initiate to the unbreakable faith of my female lineage. Patience and God. Each little breath.

I left the thorns on the roses and held them all in one overflowing crystal vase. A tangle of thorns jut from thin spindle stems crowned with large heavy decaying buds that die before they bloom. Garden roses are short. Common, maybe, I’m not sure. They sit in the kitchen warning me of how the ‘Garden of Thorns’ draws your blood. I miss everyone I have lost in grief’s varying shades. I miss old friends transfigured with new personalities, the soft eyes of lovers in love with me and their true and tender smiles of affection. It’s not just you, like you’re that special and, I’m not that special, not like I am some special named prize rose. I am…a common garden variety… orchid. I’m no rose, I don’t draw blood. Too busy haemorrhaging right now. From the heart. Not the cunt. My fucking knees hurt and I cannot count time. 

I will be happy because all not dumb cunt princesses get their best endings but I will. My hair is bouncy and everyone likes me. You stupid fucking junkie. I hate you. And never more was a word written or spoken about you. A thought passes or a plume of puff in the heart and it’s a secret now. I will erase you from existence. It’s not hard. Ask the others in the club of petite heroine love cast offs. They should grant you all an island. Guantanamo. 

‘I seek asylum’

No. We don’t grant that here. Our forgiveness is quick. Lest we forget. We never forget.