Broken Love

As they stand in the garden, he tells her he loves her. He says he is sorry. She tells him a story.

She carefully plucks a rose from a nearby bush. She shows him the perfect pedals, each with a slightly different hue, blended into one magnificent shade. She then tells him that the rose is too good for her, that its stunning beauty is more than she can ever hope to achieve. God has made this flower better than her and she is resentful of it. She balls her hand into a tight fist, crushing the perfect pedals between her fingers. She opens her hand to reveal the now damaged rose upon her palm.

She tells him that because she can never be as good as this rose, she must make the rose a lesser thing to bring it down to her level. She says that because she is more powerful, then certainly she has this right. Because she has the power to hurt this perfect gift of beauty, damaging it makes it a lesser thing, thereby bringing her up, closer in value to the rose.

She stares at the rose for a moment, caresses it. She tells it she is sorry she has hurt it, but the damaged pedals remain twisted, bent and broken in places. Yet it is still an exquisite beauty, still more beautiful than she can ever hope to be. And so again, she crushes the rose into her fist.

She continues to crush this lovely flower into her fist, each time laying open her palm to reveal the damaged pedals, each time she says she is sorry. Then, finally, she crushes the broken rose between both her fists; crushing, twisting, squeezing, until this rose is no more. All she has left is an inky mess that oozes, bleeds its once glorious colors between her fingers as the shattered pedals fall to the ground.

A single tear slides down her cheek. She says the rose is now dead, gone forever. It was irreplaceable, and even now, a better thing than she can ever hope to be. In destroying the rose, she again made it better than she, and made herself an even lesser thing than she had been before.

Clear-eyed, she looks up, into the eyes of the man. She tells him that she too is dead and the dead can not love. She tells him she knows he does not really love her, that he never truly did. She says she knows he is not sorry, that he never was. And as she walks away, she feels the sun upon her face and knows that she will be ok.