A thousand red rose petals wilt in my veins, shriveling up inside me until there is nothing left but this emptiness, a vacancy of hope, of sentiment, of all there once was. I shudder, my edges, the brink of my very existence, threatening to implode. A hole opens up within me. It pulls me and I sink into it, falling into myself. I collapse into nothing, with nothing to grasp onto, nothing to keep me safe from myself. My vision blurs. The ceiling is white, isn’t it? It looks like a cloud, stretching on into eternity. A thousand red rose petals stain my bedsheets. So soft. So warm. You would almost forget about the thorns.

Run. Don’t look back. Don’t think about where. Don’t think about why. Run. Feet pounding against the concrete like thunder rumbling up my legs and tearing, roaring, screeching, through my every nerve and my every bone and my every thought, reverberating within me, no, above me? A storm. Yes, I can see it. A strange and hideous mass of dark gray hiding from the earth any final rays of sunlight that Day had to offer. Torrents of rain, icy as death as it seeps through my clothes, weep down from the sky and melt the world into a dismal watercolor painting. Harsh gusts of chilling wind claw at my face, creating a whirling vortex of countless bleeding autumn leaves all around me—a thousand red rose petals hardened by an unforgiving cold.

The fence rattles as I throw myself against it, but I do not begin to breathe just yet. A vein of white pulses across the sky, and the earth cries out with a boom that dies down until it becomes nothing more than a quiver in the air. Yet, there is something else. This soft creaking, like the hinges of a bedroom door opened by a child newly awakened from a nightmare, seeking someone to soothe away their fears. I lift my head, and there she is. She glides with gentle grace to and fro through the air, flying without wings, without fear of falling, and it takes me a moment to see the swing she’s on. A thousand red petals cascade down from her body, rippling in the breeze that her movements create. No, no that’s just her coat.

Her murky image moves toward me, a red silhouette bleeding out into a dreary gray world, until her face begins to clear. She has eyes filled with elsewhere, with all the wanderlust of an adventurer and all the passion of a dreamer. Yet, there is a shadow of wiseness lurking around the edges—a remnant, a reminder, of some dark former suffering. A smile plays at the corners of her mouth, but there is sadness behind it, and her lips, such an evocative shade of scarlet.

A thousand red rose petals, and they would all seem so pale in comparison to her lips.

She takes my hand in hers, trailing her fingers over my burning wrist. She leans down and warmth floods my senses as she presses her mouth to my skin. She pulls away, and what remains is a red mark in the shape of her lips, encompassing the pale scars that streak my wrist. Those marks, marks which call to mind memories that I’ve forced into the forbidden recesses of my mind. My throat closes up. Panic weighs down in my chest. I can’t move. I can’t think. I’m thinking too much. I feel myself slipping away, but then something pulls me back.

As I watch, the rain falls over the red lipstick and, slowly, it begins to wash away. And, with it, goes all that was stained into my skin. All the pain. All the anxiety. All the things that I could never name, all the things that kept me up night after night, all the things that haunted me in my dreams should I slip away into a dreadful, wakeful slumber. It all melts away. And I breathe. One simple breath. That’s all it takes. She is smiling. The sadness is all gone now, no more than a distant memory.

Droplets roll down my cheeks, but they are so soft. So warm. Like a thousand red rose petals blooming over my skin.