Valentine's Always

My Valentine's Always roses are blooming again. It's a bittersweet beauty. Whenever I'm out there singing to the potatoes, I always take time to caress the leaves on the rose bush John gave me 5 years ago, and say, "C'mon, Sweetie... show me somethin' pretty."

"You were my miracle... You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away... You shone."
~Stephen King, Lisey's Story

Once again, irony targets my hindquarters. The first Valentine's Always bloom burst into glory just as I read that bit in Lisey's Story. This book is just trashing me, I tell ya. In a good way mostly, but trashing my emotional stoicism nevertheless. I connect pretty easily with written word anyway, can get lost for hours in a story, but this book. This book... Cheezus and his Fazzah (as Pope Benedict is wont to say)... I turn each page in trepidation of what all too familiar pattern might come next. I don't want to so readily identify with Lisey, yet I'm helpless not to. I want to read it slowly so I don't miss a heartbeat; I want to read it quickly and get it over with and get it the fuck out of my heart and mind (as if). The meter just plain hammers way too closely to the same measure to which I've been dancing. All too often already I've caught myself nodding in recognition, and even muttering a breathy "fuuuuuck", and I'm not yet a third of the way through it.

"The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart.”
~John Held
“How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.”
~Victor Hugo