I was stupid.
I knew I was. It wasn't like I wasn't aware getting involved in a brawl wasn't safe. But. Nothing really was safe when I was alive. Drinking the water was as safe as drinking my own piss. And the food? I didn't want to know. "Living on the edge" some called it, living in squalor more like it. I had well and truly fallen off the edge and landed in a dumper outside town, crawling out for a hit of something. A hit of alcohol, a hit of marijuana - or something stronger if you knew where the next dose was coming from. I wouldn't risk it.
I found something better. It happened to be the day I had tried to drown myself in the river, only to learn my survival instincts recommended aspirin instead. So I was clean, well - there about when I met...
No. No names. Only faces.
She was reading on an old park bench next to what must have once been a rose bush. Now, being dead and all - I can see what once was. The bush really was once a rose bush. I checked because at the time she had argued ruthlessly for that sickly yellow shrub - but I didn't believe her. But it was, and I was wrong, and I couldn't tell her now. I regret that now.
She was the wit to my swagger, her honey eyes silently laughing at me. She found me funny. I found her enchanting. Under the adolescent pimples that haloed her nose, she was beautiful. Heck, she was beautiful with them! I had promised to meet up with her the next day, we were going to sit beside her rose bush and talk. Like people, like friends, like a boy talks to a girl. I wanted to make her giggle and blush, to laugh and smile. Imagine if I had teased her so she playfully shoved me with her shoulder, laughing at my stupid grin.
But I never made it back there. Not alive anyway.
A king hit. KING HIT! When I had finally found something interesting, someone who looked like she would listen to me with clear eyes. I found my body dented on the concrete. She had no mud caked under her fingernails, or sweat dripping down her forehead. She had long brown hair braided down her back and a keen interest in life.
I didn't want to go.
I don't want to go.
So.
Here I was, sitting on the park bench waiting for her to come. I saw the different stages of the bush's life. Blood red roses fading in death, thorns blackening, stems yellowing. But it had been beautiful once.
If only I hadn't been swept up at the bar. Wrong place, wrong time.
Regret is such an annoying emotion.
She came. She sat on the bench next to me, and yet alone, reclining next to the bush as though beckoning it to conversation. I found myself wishing I was that bush. That she would look at me the way she did that piss stained shrub. I was so lonely, sitting there, watching her talk aimlessly. I was so sad she thought I was coming.
But I wasn't. I wouldn't. I won't.
The bush called me in, curling a thorn like a finger. It was sad, it was dying, it needed me. My translucent hand reached out, running an index finger down a stem. It pricked, I stared as blood dripped down the breast of the bush, startling scarlet against my washed out complexion. It hurt. I gripped the branch and laughed as it blocked the regret with its sting.
The girl stared through me as the bush moved. I looked around and felt myself curling in on the bush, combining myself with it. It grew, it stretched, it allowed my control. My form shimmered and infused with the rosebush, I felt invigorated, working my roots deep into the ground. My dwindled leaves surging with energy. I was... alive.
And so.
A boy who once belonged to the wrong side of town dipped a scarlet rose to the girl. She gasped, I smiled and slowly I bloomed. She laughed and the sound coloured my roses purple. She cried and my roses weeped blue at the cadence. She closed her eyes and I curled in around her.
Who would have thought a rosebush could love?
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