Wither

I remember.

There once was a garden that I called my home. The entirety of it was surrounded by a strong iron fence, topped with spikes to keep intruders from climbing in, and a gate that was locked with the Gardener’s key. Inside this fence, the garden was safe and it was beautiful. It was filled with vegetation and flowers of every kind you can imagine. The fruit bearing plants were kept on one side, vegetables on the other, and flowering brush scattered and covered everywhere in between. This was my home.

I watched many come and go, to and from the garden’s gate; women that visited alongside the Gardener who were impressed by his garden’s beauty; children that came to play and run around the garden’s mosaic stone path; other gardeners who’d come to exchange fresh produce, and florists that would harvest the most beautiful of the flowers and arrange them into magnificent bouquets for all kinds of purposes. But not the roses. No one who entered the garden had ever dared to touch the Gardener’s most precious roses.

Time went on and I watched as butterflies and bumblebees and people would come and go. I watched the Gardener tend to his plants like the best gardener should, and chase away ravens from his crops out of his pure love and protective instinct. Not only did I see it, but everyone who came into the garden saw how great of a gardener the Gardener was. With each passing day, I knew I was safe because I knew the garden would always be protected by the Gardener. Every day was the same, and I was content. Then it happened.

I remember it clearly. There came a day that a kind looking gentleman entered my garden through its protective iron gates. This wasn’t a beggar sneaking in to take vegetables to quench his hunger, nor a drunken thief here to steal grapes right off the vine. This wasn’t a rodent nor a raven deserving to be chased away. The Gardener let him in, so I knew; the Gentleman was safe.

I remember that day. The Gardener greeted him and the Gentleman entered the gates with a warm smile. I wondered if he was here to accept the Gardener’s generous offer of produce, or if he was here to merely take in the peace that the garden emitted. After engaging in a friendly embrace with the Gardener, the Gentleman’s kind eyes scanned the entirety of the garden… until they landed on me. The littlest rosebud on the Gardener’s rose bushes.

I could not believe it. There were thousands of flowers in this garden– roses alone! Roses that have bloomed into the most beautiful sights. I was merely a bud whose petals were still closed up and hidden from the sunlight. Still, the Gentleman noticed me growing on the edge of the thornless bush. He approached me with a smile and with the Gardener alongside, assuring me that this was no thief nor pest, and I remembered that no one ever harmed nor touched the Gardener’s roses. But then the Gentlemen knelt down and he brushed me with his gentle hands and the Gardener let him. Then he smelled me like I was not a bud; like I was no different than the beautifully bloomed roses, and he said that I was beautiful. I was taken back by these words. Me? The littlest bud on the bush? He thinks that I am beautiful? He must be mistaken. But he was not, or else he would not have taken the pair of flower cutters from his back pocket and snipped my stem from the rest of the bush. I was shocked– frightened at first. No one touches the Gardener’s roses! But the Gardener let him, and that’s when it occurred to me that I must’ve been the luckiest and the most special flower in the garden.

It had all happened so quickly. My entire life growing in the garden was over within a snip and I was cut loose and in the hands of the friend of the Gardener. He took me out through the protective iron gates and I watched as the garden became smaller the further he carried me away. He brought me to the cobblestone cottage that I could never see over the brush and the gates from my place on the rose bush. This cottage was beautiful in its own way, different from the beauty of the garden, covered in patches of moss and ivy vines. Its inside was protected by thick stone walls and a ceiling that, unlike the garden, no butterfly, nor bumblebee, nor raven could get into. We entered through a solid wood door and I watched as it was closed behind us by no other than the Gardener himself.

I had never been alone with a visitor of the garden, and there were never any intruders that made it past the Gardener or the gates for me to end up alone with. But the Gentleman was no intruder. This was a friend that the Gardener trusted, so it only made sense that I would too. He whisked me away to the kitchen of the cottage where he laid me down gently on a soft, warm, and moist cloth so that I would not go dry. I observed from my place on the counter as he took a beautiful glass vase from the cabinet above me and he filled it no more than halfway with warm water from the kitchen sink. Then he opened a drawer and from it, he pulled out a spool of silvery purple ribbon that he cut about two feet in length. He wrapped the ribbon around the neck of the vase and he tied it in a beautiful bow. Then he looked back at me, a freshly picked rose lying on the cloth on the countertop, and he smiled, making me feel special again. He lifted me from the cloth with his warm and gentle hands and he cleansed me under warm running water. Then his gaze looked down to meet my stem and he cut me down to be even shorter than it was before. I could not admit it to myself yet that it hurt. At first, it was because of the shock, But then it was because of the idea that if this friend that the Gardener entrusted with me, hurt me, then the Gardener hurt me, and the Gardener would never, ever hurt me– but he cut once more, and I winced.

The Gentleman, however, was still gentle and kind, and he noticed my pain. He held me in his hands and he softly rubbed the fresh wound with the moist warm cloth. He said that he didn’t want to hurt me and that he never meant to, and somehow that translated to he never hurt me at all.

A mere rosebud like myself could not possibly know yet the costs of being as beautiful as the Gentleman saw me, nor had I known anything about the world outside the garden. This man was generous and caring enough to teach me, and the Gardener was loving enough to let him. So the Gentleman, after tending to my needs, gently placed me into the beautiful vase he had prepared just for me, and then he set me on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Here I could thrive in the sunlight, and he could feed off my beauty.

Every morning, the Gentleman greeted me, and every night, he would brush my unbloomed petals with his gentle hands. What I felt, I had no words for, only that it was new and different from how I felt during my days in the garden. Whether it was a good different or not, I couldn’t say. But one thing I knew is that the Gentleman made sure to show me just how much he loved me and how special I was.

Then there came a day that the Gentleman told me he had to go somewhere far away because he was merely a visitor and he couldn’t stay. But he also promised that he would be back to see me very soon. I had seen many come and go, but watching him leave was as new and as different as the feeling I had felt when he had first arrived. It almost felt as though a part of myself was missing, and I had no power to get it back, nor a voice to be heard. But I was not alone in this lost and confusing time. The Gardener was with me, and as he would clean and refill my water, always caring for my needs, I began to feel that everything was back to the way things were before the Gentleman’s arrival– only I would not return to the garden. I would stay here in the cottage enclosed by its cold stone walls and wooden door, and accompanied by an unidentified tension between myself and the Gardener. At least I had my view from the windowsill so I could always see the gate to the garden in the distance, and imagine I was still growing on that rose bush. But as time went on, I would only grow to miss it, and I would never grow to be the rose I could’ve been. With each day that passed, that belief that I was special began to wither away, and not even the Gardener could reverse it.

Finally, after an amount of time I did not track, there was a knock on the door that broke the cottage’s silence and echoed vibrations throughout my glass vase. I knew immediately who it was, not only because of the fact that the usual visitors came only to see the garden and never the cottage, but because the Gardener had approached me the day before with what he claimed to be exciting news. He told me with an assuring smile on his face, that his friend, the Gentleman, was coming back today, just as he had promised. Sure enough, he was there at the door and the Gardener promptly stood up from his morning coffee to let him in.

It had not been very long since the Gentleman’s first visit, but it was long enough that I was feeling a little uncertain by his presence. I wondered if he had forgotten about me, or if he still thought that I was beautiful. For some unidentifiable reason, I was even feeling a great shame as though I had left him behind. This was closely followed by the embarrassment of thinking I was ever his to abandon to begin with. My worries became a heavy weight and I almost feared it would somehow shatter my fragile vase. This weight grew to be even heavier when I felt and heard the footsteps coming from around the hall and towards the kitchen. What if he sees me differently? That was the question I repeated in my mind. But there was a more worrisome thought buried deeper within where I dared not go, and that was, what if he sees me the same?

Then he stepped into the kitchen and every worry did not lift, but the pressure stopped. He spotted me immediately with that warm and gentle smile and that feeling that I was special came rushing back like the sunlight after being hidden away by a long lasting storm. He came back for me. That was confirmed by the way he strode towards my windowsill and greeted me after a long enough separation. To my surprise, there was no look of disappointment in his eyes. Though there never was before, so why would I fear that now? The Gentleman was never anything but kind to me, and in his return, he was still just that. Now there was no delay. The Gentleman had traveled all this way just to see me again. Not the garden; not even the Gardener. He was here for me. The little rosebud in the vase wrapped in pretty ribbon.

The way he loved me was different from the attention I got from any visitor who admired me from afar in my past. His love was even different from that of the Gardener who first planted the seed of my bush and cared for and guarded me ever since. The Gentleman, however, saw me for the rose I was. Whether still a bud or fully bloomed, it mattered not. The Gentleman came back for me, and before even saying hello, he came to my vase and he brushed my unbloomed petals with his gentle hands, reawakening that feeling I had no words for… and the Gardener watched. He watched as the Gentlemen shifted my vase out of the line of a sunray that peeked through the window. He watched as he stroked my stem and then plucked one of the only leaves I had left. I had not noticed until then that the others were missing, four to be exact, and still it did not occur to me why or where they had gone. It’s okay, the Gentleman assured me. This is how we play. Play. Like the butterflies that would fly in little circles through the air, or the children that would chase one another across the garden’s mosaic stone path; they were always so happy. Why am I not happy? I winced. My last leaf gone. Neither of those butterflies had lost a wing when they’d play. Nor did any of the children stop in their tracks and shiver or cry. Would I cry if I could? I looked to the Gardener for assurance. He was still watching. Surely he saw what the not-so-gentle Man had done. Does he know that it hurt? I looked back at the Man who returned to stroking my unbloomed petals. Does he know that it hurt? And it still hurt, but I held on to the idea that this made me special– I had to hold on to that if nothing else. He called me beautiful. Remember? But if I ever did before, I did not believe it now. This did not make me feel beautiful. Wanted, yes. Special, maybe. But not beautiful.

Then there was a sensation that traveled up my stem and throughout my petals to my deepest core. I could tell myself as much as I wanted to that it didn’t hurt. Somehow the denial brought me an inflated moment of erroneous relief. An excitement too. Is this it? For a second I believed that this could be the moment I was finally blooming into the rose I was always meant to be. That denial of the pain I was in, blinded me from the true facts which were these: I had already been cut from the roots that would allow me to ever bloom, and it was the Man’s once gentle hands who had cut me down. My false hope would only die out with the acceptance of what was happening now. My petals opened, but they were not blooming. Shriveled and weakened by the Man’s constant, not-so-gentle touch, my petals had broken off from my very core and were falling to make their beds in the dust on the windowsill beside the six leaves that were brutally plucked from my stem. I was not blooming with life and beauty; I was withering away at the hands of the man I was told I could trust– and the Gardener watched.

I don’t recall how long it was before I was diminished down to the core of what and who I was. I presume it would’ve only needed mere minutes, but I fear the time was so much longer. I wondered when it would be over; this destructive touch the Man called love; but in the idea of it ending, I also feared what would be left of me in the aftermath. Finally it came, and I still do not know which was worse; that he once thought I was too beautiful not to touch, or that I was now no longer beautiful enough to deserve his attention. Surely the latter should have been a great relief, like the bittersweet ending to a good book, but it was not that. This was only bitter.

I had been born as a mere bud on a bush in a garden where it was my God-given destiny that I would grow and bloom into a beautiful rose. Now I was not even a rosebud. I was hardly a rose at all, but a decay of what once could have been; I was a stenching rot of love turned hate, hope turned regret. I was completely severed from my dying stem and all I could do was watch as I fell from the rim of my glass vase and landed in the bed on the windowsill made by my withered leaves and petals; each one was a reminder of the signs I did not see or had ignored. All together, it was the evidence that a life had been taken away.

The Gardener– my broken spirit cried. For a second, the remains of my hope were fed by the many memories of the good Gardener and all he had done to care for and protect me. I remembered that whenever a pest or a raven made its way into the garden, the Gardener was there to chase them away. When the dog days of summer were too much to bear, he watered every crop and flower bush sufficiently and quenched our thirst. But then I remembered that when the biggest danger to his precious roses arrived at the gates or came knocking on the door, disguising himself to me as a kind smile and gentle hands, it was the Gardener who had let him in; and just like those days in the garden, and my life itself, that hope was short lived. It joined me in the form of the wind blowing my remains off the windowsill when the Gardener leaned over the kitchen sink and opened the window like I had not been lying there lifelessly, yet still conscious. All that I was had blown away and was scattered across the cottage’s cold stone floor. When I thought I could be no less than what I had already become, I was now mere dust to be stepped on and walked over. From here, I looked up at the faces of my killers shaking hands over my crushed spirit; the very hands that crushed this spirit.

A raven landed on the sill of the open window and began tugging at the silvery purple ribbon still wrapped around my vase. I watched the Gardener rush toward it frantically and shoo it back into the outside. The raven managed to untie the ribbon and fly away with its well-earned prize. The Gardener, however, in his pride-hurt frustration, knocked over the glass vase off the windowsill and over the counter as he brought in his elbows. The vase hit the ground and shattered into as many pieces as myself. When the Man and the Gardener walked, the bottoms of their feet were cut and they bled. But as though it were nothing, the Man picked up a broom and the Gardener took the dustpan, and the two of them swept up the glass and my remains in the dust, then dumped every reminder of life into a trash barrel in the kitchen closet. The last I saw as my spec of consciousness floated downwards in the cottage air, was my killers slipping on their boots right over their bleeding feet. I dare say they did so not because it hurt to walk with bare feet, but so that the blood would never be seen by any of those who visited them in the garden or in the cottage. But I know. I will always know. The blood they have shed won’t ever dry, just as the soul they’ve killed, as withered as I am, I won’t ever die. A curse or a blessing, that is for you to decide.

Now wherever or whatever I am today, I can only pray from my broken spirit that the Gardener will garden no more, and that the Man will never lay eyes on any rose or flower again. And maybe, just maybe, someone will find the raven and its treasured ribbon. For it is the last bit of proof of what was done, and that all I could've been was taken away. It was the ravens that the Gardener spent years chasing away from his garden. How poetically ironic, and ironically poetic it is, that it is in the ravens that my memory will live on.

Wither. Copyright © 2023 Sienna Skye Journey. All Rights Reserved.