The apartment had the same old smell to it when I turned the door handle and walked in. The windows were clouded with dust, the furniture inside seemed happy to see me. The walls holding the secrets of the time I was here, happy, sad, angry excited even suicidal. It had seen and heard too much. I hadn’t returned in 15 years, yet the floors creaked the same. The balcony drew me first, the roses were still there, not the tender blush-pink blossoms of my childhood but wild, overgrown things that almost seemed alive. Their vines coiled along the balcony railings; the thorns just hurt by looking at them. The petals, once soft and luminous, had deepened into shades of maroon and black, as though they had been drinking the shadows that pooled there. Even the soil looked bruised. I remembered her hands, my grandmother’s pale wrinkles fingers, moving with deliberate care as she pruned the flowers. She treated every rose as though it carried a heartbeat. “Roses remember” she once told me, “If you listen closely, they’ll remember for you” At that time, I had laughed, thinking it was nothing more than her usual sayings. But now, standing there in front of the roses, I swore I could hear her voice drifting through the leaves. It wasn’t a memory, it was presence, low and trembling, carried on the shifting wind. I reached for a bloom, hesitant, my breath shallow. The stem sank its sharp thorns into my finger with surgical precision. Blood welled, bright against the dark petal I was holding. Yet, the sting was oddly familiar, almost intimate, like a touch of a hand I hadn’t felt in many years. A chill threaded through me. It was as if the roses were claiming what had always belonged to them. The scent was different too. Gone was the sweetness I remembered pressing against my face as a child. Now the roses breathed out something heavier, metallic, thick like rust and rain-soaked bars. The smell clung to me, refusing to let go of me, to let me off its grip. I closed my eyes, for a fleeting instant, I was seven again, sitting crossed legged on the floor, listening to her stories. Only this time when she spoke, her voice was muffled, as if she were speaking beneath the soil.
The balcony seemed to shift, the air pressed closer, heavy, and the roses leaned toward me in a subtle unison, as though they recognized me. As though they had been waiting for my arrival. The silence was too unbearable, too hurtful, too powerful-Too still, too listening. My grandmother had been gone for years, buried miles away, but now as I am standing in the very place she tended to those roses, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she never ever left at all.
I looked at my hand, blood dripping onto the floor, it seemed to swallow the blood greedily. Darkening the already darkened floor. The roses shivered, and I knew then that my grandmother was right. The roses did remember. And in remembering, they had kept her here, in root, thorn, petal and shadow.
I should have been afraid. Instead. A strange calm filled me, like slipping back into a dream I’d once tried to forget. The balcony breathed for the first time in 15 years. And I breathed with it.
The roses remembered. And now so will I.
