(Rose)
I'm not sure whether we are one or two anymore. It turns out we share the same boundaries in my flesh. We can't tell where her begins and I end.
She's wrapped around arteries, vessels and organs within me, fused to them.
Her roots and her power allowed my body to continue living and recover despite fatal wounds. Wounds originating from a love I refused. She(B) took her place in my heart and alongside my blood. And this one I accept and appreciate.
We walk with the strength and abilities of our combined bodies. She biologically strengthens me, but she also needs me to eat and drink a lot more, and also things I'm not used to eat either. Weird hunger strikes me, for dirt, for ashes, for roots and soil.
She feeds from my blood and also the content of my digestive system along the way. We share the same source of chemical sustenance truly.
B - I do some photosynthesis also, but your body makes me more animal than plant.
She can move and grow a little at will. Her stems can move around me a little. She replaces my missing fingers with her owns. Her senses are still mines though. She sees what I look at and hears my voice as I do when I speak.
Her voice is an odd one, half within my head and another half an approximate sound the flowers manage somehow to make.
It might have been easier for us if she had a separate body on some aspects, but certainly more difficult on others. We're getting used to each other. She can be embarrassed too, even if my sudden loss of intimacy affects me a lot more.
She's still handful and truly improves my physical abilities anyway.
R - Am I still human?
B - It's a tricky question. Depending of what you mean, the answer can change a lot.
R - I've always been an odd bird. But at least I knew my limits as a physical human being. I've lost my boundaries from society, from my past, and now from my body too. I've lost everything I knew in the world. Family, society, life...
B - I did bring you in what must be a peculiar world to you. Everything is different and requires therefore you to adapt... But isn't this different world wonderful too? I'm so glad it became this way over time. Hadn't the world become as it is, I probably never would have been able to meet you. I thank the heavens.
R - Oh, so you're becoming a believer now? My goodness, what a peculiar flower you are...
I take a deep breath as I look around. The countryside has changed but it still looks nice and peaceful.
R - I'll admit your point. What I lost is knowledge. The world I see gone is only different, but still there. The same goes for my body, and my mind. Although...
B - You lost your past life truly.
R - That. That is the most life changing reality I can ever experience. That past I recall, because it's fully gone, is an experience that will forever haut me. Even though I made my peace regarding my lost family, there is a pain in my heart that will forever linger. Before I met you, I was just returning home. It's as if I had to accept I will never return. Not in this life and neither in the next... Given how eager I was to return home, this sadness will always leave a scar on me.
B - I've put scars on you. Please forgive me.
R - Stop drowning in guilt please.
B - I hope they will heal.
R - That is better. I like that better. I also swam close to despair a few times, not all of them because of you even. And I prevail, I will always prevail over doubt and sorrow in the end.
B - How strong are you?
R - Strong enough to go on living in this world where I lost the upmost capital thing in my life. My one true love is long gone. Not strong enough to forget it. But a reason why I can go on, is that I bet on new fascinating encounters to come, and I was right. I have met you.
B - Please tell me about your true love, I'm envious and curious.
R - Oh, silly you. I liked talking about my resiliency, especially now that I feel good and confident. But you want to hear about romance only!
B - Well, I do want to better understand you and your life too.
R - And when my periods will come, I'll have to explain to you the most embarrassing things. To think you see what I see...
B - I've had time to observe and study some of the mechanisms ruling your body already. I can understand you being careful with the parts of you that are like openings in your shell.
R - We could present it like that, but it's not only physical, it's also cultural. People like me are intimidated when it comes to sex.
B - We can discuss that subject later as you said. But please tell me more about love.
R - Well...
~
Goodness. I've begun so recently to accept your death, you being gone, and she pressures me to know beside my grief, shamelessly. She has an innocence in her way to be, not unlike the one you had...
As we walk along an endless desolated road, eating strange abandoned pods of flesh, that are like meaty mushrooms; or just whatever I can find looking edible truly. Along my odd journey with a curious companion. I'm charmed by my current reality, so I have the strength to talk about you even with a smile.
R - Love... What can I say about it is not accurate knowledge. If you were to ask ten people about love, you could gather eleven different opinions about it. Because it has ties to every aspects of our beings, philosophy, emotions, psyche, beliefs, culture, biology, instincts even. Like everybody being physically similar and still always looking different from one another; love is a kind of creature we all see growing differently from one another. Because everything about it is complex and it gathers many things. There are different kinds of love between people. For family, each person has a different status, for esteemed colleagues, and so on, and for god even.
B - Seems complicated indeed. Which ones did you experience?
R - I've known my parents love for each other, their love for me their child and their other children. The love between us sisters, and the one we had for our parents. Then, outside the family we enter the other main form of love, where I know quite less. I would say that love is the feeling that helps humans staying together, as a family and making new ones. It's our magnetic side. We tend to love, it's in our nature. We need it.
B - If I understand, there's the family love that keeps families together, and the romantic love that helps families to grow?
R - It's correct I believe. Parents are naturally inclined to love their children, the later are naturally inclined to love them in return. Things can go wrong everywhere, but I believe the fundamental status is this one.
B - And romantic love is the one binding new people together after they met. Just like you and me.
R - You're a shameless flower... Maybe I feel more of you as a pet that is? Since you're not human, romantic love doesn't make much sense to me. But I can see the kind of love that relates to friends, or pet, perhaps to the point where you already feel like family to me.
B - I lived for you.
Did I hurt her feelings?
R - I'm human. You never were. But I do know what you've been through, and what you so patiently did, to get closer to me. You created me, and you, for us to hopefully meet one day. It's far beyond what we humans can comprehend, or even you maybe. I remember you telling me you only lived on instinct back then, unable to speak or truly think. I wonder what made you attracted to me so early?
B - A spark, a glint. Something like a spark in utter darkness, which suddenly focused all my attention. Instead of slowly growing randomly and evenly in every direction of space, I suddenly wanted to get closer to that thing I briefly detected, and spent all my energy taking a picture of. It was the beginning of me.
R - you did say that you were now alive because of me. So there is a childish aspect in your love for me maybe, rather than romantic?
B - I'm not sure about that, I never thought of you as a mother. You're the reason why I evolved, you did not create me. What does it change?
R - In our regard, nothing I guess. Likewise, I don't see you in any way as a mother despite you creating me as I am today.
B - I'm not a second mother to you, I'm an artist.
I burst in laughter hearing that, still walking.
R - An artist? You have a wicked sense of humour there. That was fun. No, you're simply a little too much self-conscious today. It's better than when you weren't enough.
I mark a pause and hold one of its flowers in my wounded hand.
R - Your love is real. I won't deny that. But what we are to each other and what we'll become, it will take time to be described and understood. Be patient. And I love you too.
I blush and resume walking. Strange feelings run across our body.
B - Thank you...
R - I'm evolving too in ways I never would have expected. That's a part of being alive. Love can be similar... You still want to hear about my one true love though?
B - Heavens yes.
I laugh again at her choice of words. I hardly see a monster like her believing in heavens. I remember that land under her influence, red like blood and fire up to the skies themselves. Flesh liquefying, and that plant like monstrosity higher and wider than a city and its tallest buildings. She once had been able to turn the land itself into her own twisted image.
Who would have expected this monstrosity to only be a pupa, aiming to become so little instead. The gigantic monstrous plant transformed into sentient little flowers... This makes no sense, unless you take into account her deep wish and personality. Her love was one of a kind.
R - My one true love was a little like yours, in that fact that it wasn't supposed to be as it ended up being, under normal circumstances. Somehow, life made it happen, and I was happy...
I'm a little overwhelmed by nostalgia as I recall our life together. Tears swell up as I recall your young smiling face.
R - I met her when I was a child, when she was born. She was the third of my sisters. I was a young girl, and I met this baby in my mother's arms, sleeping against her breast. I've loved my little sister from before she was even born.
B - So it was a family love then?
R - yes, it was. Over the years it insanely grew, but it remained a family kind of love. It never evolved into something romantic, and wrong. But I loved her more than anything in the world as we grew. She was like you in more ways than you'd think; which is maybe why I could so easily feel at ease with you. Well, she was struggling to become human, not unlike you. She grew very hollow, very forgetful. She only had moments of humanity, cleaved with times where it was as if her soul was forever gone.
B - Her soul was gone?
R - She had a kind of abnormal blood flow in her brain a specialist said, but that was just a flimsy theory. We never found the name of her condition. Since birth, from time to time, a side or another of her being was shutting down almost randomly. It made her very strange and unreliable. But she wasn't able to realise it at all. To her, her live was, well, not as we others could perceive it.
B - You loved her despite her flaws?
R - Suffering is another element love interacts with. Depending on the people and situations of suffering, it can strengthen or strain and weaken the love. My sisters had growing difficulties dealing with the suffering and grew distant. I grew even closer. She was my choice for a world, no matter how strange it was and sounded.
B - but did she love you?
R - She did, in her own way. In her selfish way... Which pained my two other sisters even more... Love can also bring up the worst in people, and conflicts beyond reason. Don't forget that. Passion probably kills more than hare alone does.
R - Our family was heading toward a sad drama one way or another as the years flew by. I expected my sisters to abandon us sooner or later, but something else happened that was unrelated to us. Our mother and them died in a town fire, and I thought returning home that she did too. The time I spent looking for her was absolute torture and loneliness for me. An utter excruciating loneliness I could barely withstand. That's when I realised the width of my love, of my need for her, at that time when I lost her for days looking for her whereabouts. I wasn't myself anymore... I wasn't myself anymore as I was looking for her, following the clues. It was a quest for survival. I felt so awful and driven I can't describe it.
Living through that again would have turned me insane.
R - Until I found her. Until I was finally reunited with her. Then we rebuilt our home and our life together, just the two of us. And by some miracle, her mind stabilised following her accident and recovery. She became a full person and I was even more happy being in love with her.
B - How was she cured?
R - Sometimes, you have to cut flesh open to repair what's inside. My understanding of it is that something similar occurred. An accidental wound and its operation helped cure the deeper problem by pure chance. All was not well as I was away, but there was so much happiness at home, I wish I'd never left.
B - I'm sorry you lost her, but I'm glad you came.
R - I don't blame you for what you did oddly enough. I can understand spurs of selfishness when it come to love. Plus, I know we ended up happy. This knowledge helped me greatly mourn my loss, and making room for new goals to come in my life. Knowing she and I were happy in the end, was the one thing I needed to know in order to move on. And therefore to accept you in my heart, and literally around it also.
I can feel the blood vessels around my heart, pulsing as she shivers on my chest.
B - I liked your life story.
R - Me too. I'm lucky enough to have had happiness, and being a strong rose. I never gave up.
B - And neither will I. I love you.
R - Thank you.
I smile and we go on. I smile heartily, feeling lighter.
~