When I was young, mum and I moved into the most fantastic flat. I thought it was the greatest place in all of Britain, and it was ours. There was a wild rose bush outside that had just popped up out of the large hole in the cracked-up cement. Mum had pointed it out to me on a chill morning, the tiny little green plant that I thought was maybe a weed of some sort. She’d tugged me over and marveled that a plant of any sort could grow out of a crack in the asphalt, me standing there shaking in this huge puffy coat and her blathering on about what I though was just a weed. I forgot about it just a few seconds afterwards when she dragged me away to the Tesco. What did I care about a weed in a dirt patch outside of our flat?
Imagine my surprise when two years later, just walking along to school, I saw a tiny pink bud beginning to peek open on the little plant I though was a weed.
I stared at it with my wide blue eyes, while it sat trembling there in a strong breeze with dew hanging from it in wavering drops. Every day after that, I tended to that little rose bush like it were my own child or something. I watched it sprout from what I had assumed was a scraggly weed into a lovely two-foot plant with plenty of roses hanging onto it. They drooped on their stems, these big floppy classic red roses that smelled like tea and sugar and nodded at me every morning on my way to school. I would nod back, smiling happily. I would talk to that little bush, and sometimes when the roses began to droop a bit too much I would clip a couple and take them home to my mum.
It was my first, and only, friend.
When I came back one night from a long day of learning and football practice, I didn’t even think to check on the rosebush. Most people just left it alone- it was in the alley right in between two towering flats, behind our rubbish bins. What would they want with an insect-covered plant that looked sickly on its best of days, I’d thought. Well, I wish I had looked in on it that night. I really do. It just slipped my mind, and I was so very tired after listening to people yell at me all day for not being able to do anything right…
The rose bush was gone the next day. The whole alley had been re-paved with pristine gray cement, along with a few other fancy renovations to my street. The trampled and mangled bush lay in the neighbour’s rubbish bins, the long roots still clumped with dirt, and soft ruined petals strewn about, peeking out from under bits of the old cracked cement. I touched it for just a second, and looked at the newly paved alley, and did not move. My mum came to collect me for tea, shouting my name worriedly. When she found me, I was sitting on the ground just sort of stroking the rose bush still. She gently pried me away from it, patting me on the head.
‘It’s alright,’ she murmured consolingly as she dragged me away, ignoring my distress. ‘We’ll get you a lovely new rose bush, one that’s potted so you can keep it inside.’
I don’t think she understood that I didn’t want any more rose bushes, or tea with honey and comforting words. I didn’t want anything at all.
I had learned my first life lesson well, and still hold it close to this very day-
Never fall in love with anything. Not a person, not an idea, not a dream, not even an object. It doesn’t amount to any good.
Luther the Pixel Pixie Community Member 
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