Rosy thoughts

My feet don't need a map as I trace the oft-travelled paths around my home, wake-walking in a perpetual state of melancholy intellectual sleep, pondering over nothing in particular and everything in general. I was in one of these walks, when my thought train was snapped back to reality with a strange sound, a defiant crunch with a definite hint of ever-lasting softness, a sound hardly heard in the humdrum cacophony of city life but yet somehow reverberating throughout the fabric of one's spiritual existance. I glanced down and found a very distraught looking tiny rosebud, its delicate petals yet to open, smothered all over by the grime of city streets.

The corners of my mouth twitched as I remembered the not-so long past 'rose day'. The inherent idea of plundering something so beautiful and serene, just for the inexplicably moronic ordeal of presenting it to a loved one, is fraught with a despicable sense of affection. Though I appreciate the underlying sentiment running in this practice, I would certainly frown my eyes out if every Tom, Dick and Harry got a bunchful just for the sake of it! My heart went out to the innocence this tiny sapling exuded as I pruned the fouled wings.

It is not the rose's fault that its beauty, though paralleled by many others, has come to symbolise a feeling whose roots themself lie in unquestioned affection. To think that someone must have loved it intensely for a day, and then just unceremoniously dumped it into the waste in the morning was simply painful. If only these tiny things had ears and could listen to all the affectionate words being woven around them, even if for a single day, maybe it would have eased their passing on. An article I had read about 'green weddings', wherein these frivolous wastages of nature's beautiful gifts are scorned at, came unbidden to my mind.

If only the world grew wiser!