A Rose for Whom it May Concern

We hung our legs over the edge of a springtime of wisteria, calling back to the birds that made their homecoming heard. We told you, try listening with your ears instead of with your predisposition. You were hardly in a position to argue with Father watching from the window. You asked us when roses would be in bloom, and we laughed at you.

“You more stupid than you look, boy? You see any rosebushes here?”

You said, well, no. But roses had always been your favorite. So the girls all giggled at you and the boys laughed too hard because that’s the way that boys are. “Roses?” They chided you, and continued to laugh, and you looked upon them with disdainful familiarity.

I said to you, don’t worry about it, the new kid always has it rough.

When summer came we told you to try not to breathe so deeply – oleanders were in bloom that time of year. You had two black eyes and ten different stories for each, but it was summer and we were kids. I guess when you’re a kid, belief is relative. If there were ten of us, and only ten, and we all believed something, didn’t that technically make it true?

As in, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Just don’t tell mom and dad because they’ll say no, and then it can’t be true anymore. But if there’s no one to yell false, then that’s that, and your bruises came from falling down or walking in the dark.

What did we care, anyway, with beauty and danger both blooming in the heat; you suggested without smiling that it was a good time of year for poison to be so abundant.

We were all sort of walking in the dark, anyway.

With the arrival of autumn we played in the leaves as though we had never aged at all, but you maintained that it was your least favorite season because everything was dying, and there was no way to stop it. We didn’t know what to say, so we told you that, well, that’s the point, right? Give everything a nice farewell and then await its return. Except you just shook your head and walked away, and we still didn’t really worry.

We should have worried, probably. Because we knew that you didn’t want to be at home. So where could you be if not with us?

And when winter chased off all our midnight games of cops and robbers, it chased you off too. We were always come and go like that, I guess.

Before the service, they told us all that roses were expensive, and it was nice of us to want to buy them, but unnecessary.

We didn’t understand that unnecessary was a euphemism for people not wanting to spend money on dead kids, I guess.

So we pooled all of our money together and bought as many roses as we could afford, and the girls didn’t giggle and the boys didn’t laugh. We didn’t really look each other in the eyes anymore; it was, in essence, the act of being lead away from the dark. In our new, clumsy youth, we stumbled across uneven surfaces, fawns unused to life and light, blinking away the confusion. We never talked about it after that day - some silent mutual agreement stated that, well, no one needs to know that it was sort of our fault, that we should have seen it coming, that we should have said something.

I figure that it’s just belief, being relative again. If there were ten of us, and only ten, and we all believed that we couldn’t have done anything, then it had to be true. There was no one to contradict us.

Except, well, there was. Because I don’t think we ever really believed it.

As in, no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

Just please don’t tell mom and dad.

-Francis Pharcellus Church, The New York Sun, September 21, 1897