The pain and harshness of thorns can overcome the beauty of a sweet-smelling rose. Known for its eye-catching appearance, the flower never loses the sharp defects protruding from its vines. Winter arrives and eliminates the spring’s work, but hidden beneath the earth, she awaits another year. Her blood-red petals emerge from their hiding place as the frost takes its annual vacation. The sun-catching leaves form and the thorns arise from within her. Temporary hibernation cannot conceal the beloved perennial’s eternal beauty and flaws.
She becomes formed through the world’s decisions. Roots bury themselves as a man kneels on one knee acquiring a friend to stick by his side for a lifetime. The stem sprouts as a new mother holds the life that she is responsible for in her arms for the first time. The laughter of a child allows a white petal to come into creation, the purity of its innocence overcoming the negative aspects. Red overcomes the vacancy of color within the leaflet as a father sacrifices the last coin in his possession to provide his family with another meal. Her thorns swell through the skin as the desire for revenge pulls a trigger, taking yet another life.
She is the world. She is its determination, growth, purity, sacrifice, and hatred. She is the memories of adolescents, and the regrets of their ancestors. She is the future and the past. Her pigment flows through the veins of every creation. Mistakes cannot be avoided, happiness cannot be extinguished, and oppression cannot be diminished. Memories, harsh weather, make her stronger. The longer she endures the regret and pain of life, the more beauty and determination she holds within the next germination. Her birth arouses like that of a young child, not yet seeing the bloodshed in the future, and not yet realizing her effect upon the world.
In a time of disease, war, and confusion, love cannot emerge. The action of murder does not result in adoration for the killer. However, blindly, the world occasionally allows a new bud to sprout from the darkest of times, and the deepest of winters.
Looking out the window, Amelia’s long blond curls blew back slightly as explosions from outside sent air hurdling through the thin separations in the frame. As she stood in awe of the glorious sunset arriving with a company of black clouds and then fading to push its children off into the world on their own, the eight year old wondered how fire and rage could have brought this single beauty into the world.
“Amelia! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” her father screamed through ear-ringing blasts as he lifted her from the ground and raced into the cold basement. For Americans in 2018, the cold icy walls served as comfort in the usual occurrences of battle. The blood draining into the streets from these occurrences, served as the beginning of Amelia’s future, sacrifice, and realization.
Pushing through bodies and rocks, a young seventeen-year-old threw her golden spiraled hair and treaded upon the ruins of what she used to know. Losing her father nine years earlier to a surprise bombing led by their own government gave her a reason to hate the world she lived in; however she chose to do the opposite. When an outbreak of a virus consumed half of the world, no one expected the survivors to live through another contagion. A love for war and violence erupted from within the confusion. Everyone feared life, and prayed for death.
For two years the young girl had been trained in weaponry and fighting tactics, but she vowed to use them only to protect those who couldn’t fend for themselves. After having her own sum of victims, she came to the realization that the enemy wasn’t death, or life, but the enemy was the thief, the killer in the night, the henchman to the carrier of souls. A life was not meant to be determined by others or even by the holder of the existence of those memories, but by the creator. Diseases, guns, and fire were the enemies. She was the doctor, and reviver of those who were attacked with fear and anguish.
Amelia Mitchell stood as purity in a time of devastation. She had made mistakes, and she had been the thief, but she had come to the understanding of what life was, and its great value. Through her work of saving lives, loving others, and seeing beauty within a world of devastation, she was the rose.
Memories, actions, decisions, and life is the rose. She continues on with thorns, still maintaining beauty, and reviving herself after the melting of ice during the prime of another year. She finds beauty within the world, and illuminates it with her own beauty also. She is proof that everyone deserves their life, and she is the product of determination and confidence. She extinguishes the continuation of hatred within herself, and presses forward to share her enlightenment. She is beautiful, strong, independent, and determined, but not perfect. She is humble and aware of her imperfections, but confident in the qualities held within her. She is what everyone wishes to be and has the capability of being.