Roses

Imagine you're a girl. Perhaps you are, so that wouldn't be too hard. Imagine you're a girl who is curious about her sexuality. Imagine you've pinned your hopes, your future on a school sweetheart who turns out to be a drunk, a deadbeat, a borderline rapist(to quote Bill Bailey) and just like every trailer park cliche you've ever heard of and never figured you'd be embroilled in. Unhappy doens't even approach covering it.

You meet a girl. Pretty, overwhelmingly intelligent, witty and considerate. The type of girl who loves other girls... girls like you, for some reason, and when she realises that all the talk is not merely talk, and after a number of tentative touches and wasted evenings, you kiss, she shows you how it should be.

She keeps your hope alive, through those toughest times, where your body would otherwise not be yours at all but something for others to hurt you with. She keeps that spirit burning, those secrets put the grin in your eye and the swing in your hips whilst he gradually steels your determination to get away: she reminds you how good you can feel.

You learn that girls are as soft as you expect, furled like roses and gentle like the warm sea. You thrill like pure electricity; you melt like the chocolate you once attemted to eat for breakfast together in July; you cry for the sheer pleasure and the happinessand the love of it all.

And when you part your ways, bittersweet as such partings notoriously are, you carry the little tokens forever:the ring, the picture of the flowers, the notes, the knowledge that you are worth something so consumingly perfect.


Thank you, Gorgeous. You saved me.