Waiting for Roses to Grow

The trees growing through your lungs are making you cough. Sometimes when you wake up it feels like your body is drowning itself. Comically you cluck and flutter as the briers entwine and draw blood before you can heave forth the rattling thorns. You fall back, wiping your sweat away as you are released for a moment more. The blooms wait for another day. Smiling again. Unaware or not a care. You fool.

We went to The Swan, and now I’m sitting here in the corner next to a group of your ‘friends’ watching you talk and gesture madly. We were in the hospital today. But you won’t tell them that. You won’t tell them they’re killing you. I have your pills in my bag. I sit feeling angry with every moment of the display. Your cheeks flutter like blood-soaked apricots, or a comic-book Santa Claus, as you laugh and repeat that story you love, the one with the dog and the pint of Beamish, with swirling enthusiasm. But I see nothing jolly there. It’s a sad picture of an overweight sweating fool sucking repeatedly like a baby. Those yellow lips bare the indent slightly left of centre where that floppy cigarette always sits; takes its place, like the stalk of an apple, as a part of your face. Needing the laughs and glowing eyes of those witness to your performance, you’re as blind to their picture of you as you are to yourself. Enjoyment is theirs but, you know, it’s only as a carnival fascination with the creature before them. I sit there embarrassed with my gin and tonic; fascinating myself with the unfamiliar lipstick smear on the glass, turning it to drink from the other side, then finally wiping it with my hankie. I can’t help thinking that the years we’ve been together mean nothing if you leave me now. I told you. I told you so many times. But, like you were wrapped up in one of those stories, you carried on… energetically swimming through life oblivious to the currents that had hold of you already.

So it’s spread now then. I was right, yes I was. And our friends all know it. You’d never realise, you still continue to say how, ‘hell at least I enjoy my life’. And you say ‘what have I done?!’ What a cheek! When I look back all the years I spent slaving my hands to the bone, scrubbing and cooking, bringing your drinks too; looking after you! I could’ve drunk myself, like I wasn’t a lady. But instead I chose a good and simple life. Skin and bone I know I am, but I lived my life right, and you don’t care. And now what’s left for me? I sit back and watch you die?! My life’s nearly over and this is how you repay me.

Aren’t I the real victim here?

Watching as you’re sweating filth and talking cherries.

Daily, I’ve been tending the briers, just the way you ask.

They grow more densely with each passing day but still I look out across them searching for a way to pass and find that thing of beauty my hazy memories hint was once there. I can no longer see it. All I see is you blundering back from the bar with another round of drinks. You fall onto the chair and pause, leaning slightly forward, your fist pumping into your chest. As I hear that familiar crackle in your lungs, I sit, waiting for the bronchial seizures to grip, and take a sip of my next G’n’T.