The Rose in her Hair(A Study of a man and a woman: Section 2)

Everything is tinged with a pale orange glow. There are voices running past the door to her thoughts. Loud. Louder. Soft. Loud again. And then, a stray whisper…
She catches the whisper and tucks it into her hair. It shivers in her curls like a terrified rose. Afraid that she might twist trendils of her hair in her fingers and drop the rose.

She will not drop it. She knows exactly where it is in her hair. And she will not touch it. She too, is terrified it will fall.

But the stream beside her little red cottage in the woods, freezes over in the winter. Without water, the rose begins to wither. She tries to prevent it from shriveling. She cups it in her hands, breathes over it, holds it to her hair. Holds it close. But as it dries, the tighter she holds , the more it crumbles.
All through winter, she nurses it with the fierce instinct of a lioness and her cubs. Some call it the love of a mother. Others, the love of survival.But there are no genres in love. No lines draw the boundaries of paternal, maternal, sexual, or friendly love.
Love just is.

The rose is a slave to its own existance.
It may not fall. But it will crumble.
Its death will not come as a surprise.
And this prolonged demise will turn the rose into a broken vein, throbbing in her hair.


She wonders, as she watches the river come back to life as the season dies, if there is an afterlife.
And if there is an afterlife, would the broken vein mend?
And if there is an afterlife, would she remeber the rose?
And if there is an afterlife, would everything she has thought and felt, matter?
And if all this, that IS her, didn't matter, would it really be HER in that afterlife? Who would be that woman?

.....Sometimes, death is sweet.