by Voicu Mihnea Simandan
“There was too much of this emptiness,
and this was not where I wanted to be.”
(Paul Theroux, My Other Life)
It is said in folklore that the first rose was planted out of loneliness.
Its story begins a long time ago when a girl, in order to get rid of a curse set on her, decided to plant it. So, she planted a seed hoping that she would never be lonely again and someone or something would always be by her side. Even if it was just a flower. But when the plant grew bigger, the girl noticed that it was full of thorns, which pricked her every time she wanted to touch it. Being very angry, that girl cursed the flower with her own bane, then took it far away and planted it in a valley called the Weeping Valley.
In this Valley everything was different. Nobody wanted to walk through it because everybody knew it was a strange place, where they all felt confused, and understanding nothing of what was happening around them. Here you could find no-one except the cursed flower, which was not ugly, but on the contrary, had a pleasant perfume and its petals were crimson red. (Someone could say that the flower could not possibly feel lonely because it was just a flower, and plants could not have any kind of feelings. That someone was terribly wrong!)
Nevertheless, it happened, although rarely, that all sorts of people did pass through that Valley. They all watched the flower in a puzzled way. Once they decided to give it a name, so they called it “Rose.” But as soon as they tried to touch it they felt the stings of the rose’s thorns. The flower was abandoned immediately at that same moment. Every once in a while, a curious young miss wanted to touch the flower too. But immediately after she realized the first drop of blood surfacing on her fingers, having the same color as the rose’s petals, she panicked and left in a hurry, leaving behind the lonely rose.
Every one of these young women, who had the courage to come so get to the rose, left a thread of their own blood on the rose’s thorns. These red threads made the rose remember again and again that it was unwanted, that everybody thought it had a dark soul. But it was not true, because nobody came to know it well enough to understand its true soul.
In fact the rose’s tragedy was caused by the fact that it was cursed to remain alone. But it is still believed that there was someone out there who would take it out of the Weeping Valley, the valley which it didn’t hate, but love. It loved it because it was the only thing which remained by its side from time immemorial. It was the only thing which didn’t run away from it when it noticed that the beauty of its fragrance and of the petals’ colour was compensated by those thorns which, as time passed by, became more red.
But there was someone who loved this rose and deeply loved it very much. This someone was me, but… too bad it was only me who loved it. I knew that it loved me too and maybe even more than I loved it. But… it all ended sad and sorry because I realized that both the rose and I were alone. Thus we had more and more sad memories to share more and more certainties that we would never get rid of the curse, and that we would be forever lonely.
“Hey! But how can you say that the rose is still lonely if you love it?”
“It’s easy, because I am the rose.”
(5 January 1998 – revised in April 2006)
Originally published in Daily Flash 2012: 366 Days of Flash Fiction,
edited by Jessy Marie Roberts, Daily Flash Publications, 2011, p. 224
