Life is composed of things that are more important than they
should be.
You are existing, moving, minding your own business in a
black-and-white world, and suddenly something meaningless becomes doused with a
bucket of scarlet importance, like a single snowflake on your tongue.
And it feels like hope.
…
I’m at the front doors of Kroger, shopping list in hand: six
apples, some bagels, a bottle of wine. And more I’m sure I’ve forgotten, and
more I need that they don’t sell. Where do you buy joy, or happiness, or peace?
Hope. On sale. 50% off
with coupon.
For the past year, the colors had
been slowly fading from my world like a book in the August sun on a front porch
swing. With every day, I had less energy to paint in the color that was
draining away or to remember what it was like to see beauty where others saw
darkness. Now I was the one who saw in shades of grey.
But sometimes you don’t know what will become color in your
grayscale world.
In front of the grocery store doors, a pallet of miniature roses.
Cheap green plastic pots and buds wilting from the hot Texas sun, soil dry from
neglect and leaves turning brown.
But color.
Green and pink and soft dull white, red-tipped buds that
promised to bloom and some that already had. Smeared yellow leaves with purple jagged
edges, tips curled down like toes in sand and petals that felt like peace. Long
green stems and pink-rimmed buds, bees crawling in dirt like children at play, and
as my fingers brush through flowers and leaves, my world becomes a three-dollar
rose bush.
And like in the stories you heard as child and you always wished
were true, for a moment the curse is broken and my world is drenched in color,
and I remember what I used to know: that there is beauty in this world, and to
see it is called faith.
That morning, I took a rose bush home.
Hope. On sale. $2.99.
…
In the end, I believe that life is composed of things that
are more important than they should be, like sunsets and love and small red
rosebushes.
To see that is an unreasonable thing, an unreasonable
happiness.
But it feels like hope.
