Roses Are Red

In each of our lives, we have turning points. Those moments when something happens, or maybe doesn’t happen, where the direction and view we have of our lives shifts and finds a new focus, for better or for worse. One of those moments happened for me on a Valentine’s Day about 10 years ago when I received a dozen long stemmed red roses…that were not meant for me.

When you are single and have no significant other in your life, Valentine’s Day is one of the WORST holidays around. It seems to be a day whose sole purpose to exist is to remind those who have no one of their own to love just how much they are missing out on. You see ads and commercials and movies all around you with happy couples, holding hands and just being oh so much in love with each other. That’s all great and warm and fuzzy when you have someone to share those special moments with, but when you don’t…..it sucks! I spent many a lonely Valentine’s Day just that way and what just made it all that much worse for me was that I was a hopeless romantic. I bought into all that romantic stuff lock, stock and barrel. I ate it up as if it were chocolate covered cherries dipped in ice cream and covered in sprinkles and cream. My already vivid and overactive imagination would often wonder if there was someone else out there somewhere who felt as I did and that somehow, someway, we would find each other and live happily ever after. Yep…..I think I watched Sleepless in Seattle just one time too many.  

This particular Valentine’s Day that I am talking about right now started out just like every other one for me…..boyfriendless. My parents would always get me a card and a box of candy for Valentine’s Day and I always appreciated it greatly, but that was about all I could ever expect to receive for the day. But on this Valentine’s Day, something unexpected happened. About 3 in the afternoon our doorbell rang. When I answered the door, it was a delivery boy holding a large box filled with a dozen long stemmed red roses! For one brief second…just one brief moment…I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that maybe….just MAYBE…somehow these roses were meant for me. Perhaps somehow my one true love from some far off kingdom had found me, after looking for me for so many years, and discovered that perhaps he should have thought to first look for me in Brooklyn as opposed to Camelot or Sherwood Forest as he MUST have been doing all of the years up until then (hey, even Prince Charming can goof sometimes). But once my moment of fantastical bliss was complete, reality took over and I knew those roses were not intended for me. They were for my next door neighbor who wasn’t home at the time. The delivery boy asked me if I would mind accepting them for her. When I brought them inside, I just looked at them, admiring their beauty. I held the box in my arms as if I was a newly crowned Miss America. I closed my eyes and breathed in their sweet perfume. For those few moments, I had experienced what so many others would get to experience on their Valentine’s Day. I had received a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day. But I didn’t indulge in my fantasy for too long and allowed reality to enter my mind and swiftly clear away the traces of the bliss that remained. I closed the box, put them down, and started to cry. That single moment felt like a massive culmination of all of the sadness, loneliness and hopelessness that I had felt every year on this day. That had to rate as one of the lowest points of my life. It was that moment that made me realize that I needed to do SOMETHING to change things for myself…..which took some time and hard work for me to do.

A year or so later, I met the man who would become my boyfriend for close to five years (we broke up 4 years ago). The first time we met, he brought me a bouquet of flowers…which included a single red rose. It was the first rose that was ever given to me…..and I still have it. I would have loved to kept it suspended in a bell jar forever like in the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast” but instead I dried it and have it safely tucked away in a small Rubbermaid container (not quite the bell jar, but it was the best I could do).  Money was tight for us in the beginning but one year on Christmas Eve after he had gotten a good paying job, he brought me home a dozen long stemmed red roses…..and this time they were really for ME and were mine to keep. I am fortunate to have received roses from him after that as well as from my boyfriend now, too, and I save the petals from all of them in a pretty glass jar. I waited a very VERY long time to receive roses from someone special….so I don’t take ANY of them for granted.

With that, I would like to simply say this…..

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

With some hope and patience,

Some wishes REALLY CAN come true!