A Muse on Things Unfinished.

My life has been a catalogue of aspirations that reached a certain level and then were snatched away by forces or circumstances beyond my control. Mostly I dealt with it well enough, accepting for the most part that what can’t be changed shouldn’t be dwelt on, and that once something has gone it’s gone. I’m not the type to look back in anger either, because I seem to lack the capacity for entrenched bitterness. I admit that I do sometimes wander nostalgically among the headstones of dead adventures, but I don’t try to reanimate something from which the life force has clearly flown.

But a few aspirations are different. They’re the rosebuds in stasis which sit on the branch unopened as the garden around them waxes and wanes. As such they become objects of curiosity and nagging frustration. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year they sit there, inviting the eye to will them to open. And so it does, but still they hold their place, unrepentant and unyielding.

And then the mind begins to suspect that the bud is only a pristine husk; inside it is nothing but the browning detritus of a long-decayed flower-in-waiting. Eventually, even the eye begins to doubt the evidence of its own faculty. Maybe the husk itself is just a mirage, persistence of vision made manifest by a sense of something unfulfilled. Sometimes the rosebud vanishes at that point, and sometimes it doesn’t.