When the Roses Taught Me How to Bleed Without Apology

When the Roses Taught Me How to Bleed Without Apology

I came to the roses because I'd forgotten how to be gentle with anything, including myself. Jakarta's heat had turned me brittle—snapping at traffic, at silence, at the mirror that showed me a face I didn't recognize anymore. I'd spent months performing competence while my hands shook under the table, and somewhere in that collapse, I read a single line in a secondhand gardening book: Roses reward patience more than skill. I didn't have skill. But I had time I didn't know what to do with, and a strip of earth along the east fence that nobody had touched in years.

The first morning I knelt there, the soil was hard as grudge. I pressed my fingers down and felt it resist, and I thought: Good. At least something here is honest about not wanting me. I dug anyway. Sweat dripped into the dirt. My nails split. A thorn I didn't see opened a line across my palm, and I watched the blood bead and fall, bright against the dark ground, and felt nothing. Not pain. Not fear. Just a strange relief that something inside me could still prove I was alive.

People warned me roses were difficult. They said it with the same tone they used when they told me I should try yoga, or therapy, or letting go. You have to be so careful with roses. They'll punish you if you get it wrong. And I thought: Let them. I'm already being punished. At least this time I'll know why.

But the roses didn't punish me. They just refused to lie.

The first shrub I planted was a bare-root cutting I bought from a woman at the market who looked at my hands and said, "You've never done this before, have you?" I shook my head. She wrapped the roots in damp cloth and told me to soak them overnight, to wake them gently, to talk to them if I wanted. I didn't talk. I put them in a bucket of water and sat on the kitchen floor and cried until my throat was raw, because I couldn't remember the last time anyone had told me to be gentle with something that couldn't scream back.

I planted it the next morning before I could change my mind. Dug a hole wider than deep, the book said. Let the roots spread outward before they reach down. I set the cutting on a small mound of soil and draped the roots like I was arranging hair, and for the first time in months, my hands stopped shaking. The earth took it. I watered slowly, watching the soil darken and settle, and when I stood up, my knees were caked in mud and my back ached and I felt—not happy, not yet—but present. Like I'd finally stopped running long enough for my body to catch up.

The roses didn't bloom for weeks. They sat there, green and quiet, and I checked them obsessively—morning, noon, dusk—convinced I'd killed them, convinced I'd ruined the one thing I'd tried to do right. But they were just thinking. Learning the soil. Deciding whether to trust me.

When the first bud appeared, I stood in front of it and sobbed so hard I had to sit down in the dirt. It was small and tight and impossibly brave, and I thought: You didn't ask for permission. You just decided to try.

I learned their language slowly. The way leaves curled when they were thirsty. The way canes reached toward light even when I planted them in the wrong spot. The way thorns didn't apologize for existing—they just were, sharp and necessary, a reminder that beauty doesn't owe you safety.

I learned to prune, and it felt like violence at first. Cutting away dead wood, thinning the center, choosing which buds would lead and which would be sacrificed. My hands shook again. I whispered apologies to every branch I removed. But the shrubs didn't flinch. They answered with new growth, stronger, cleaner, like they'd been waiting for me to trust them enough to hurt them in the right way.

A neighbor leaned over the fence one afternoon and said, "Roses are so high-maintenance, aren't they?" And I looked at the bed—wild and thorned and blooming in defiant pinks and deep reds—and I said, "No. They just don't pretend to need less than they do." She laughed like I'd made a joke. I wasn't joking.

The soil became my altar. I fed it compost and leaf mold, crumbled it between my fingers to check the texture, breathed close to the ground to smell if the balance was right. Sour meant I'd pushed too hard. Sweet meant I could try again. I watered at dawn, before the heat arrived, before anyone could see me kneeling there like I was praying—which, in a way, I was.

I stopped feeding them when autumn leaned in, let them slow down, let them rest. I wanted to fight it—wanted to keep them blooming, keep proving I could do this—but the book said: Let them sleep. Growth needs silence too. So I did. I mulched lightly, tied the canes loosely against the wind, and walked away. And the roses survived my absence better than I thought they would.

Winter was cruel. Frost blackened some of the canes. A storm snapped a climber I'd trained along the fence. I stood there in the cold, staring at the broken wood, and felt the old panic rise—I failed, I ruined it, I should never have tried—but then I saw the base was still green. Still alive. Still deciding.

Spring came. The roses came back. Not all of them. But enough. And the ones that returned were tougher, wilder, scarred in ways that made them more beautiful, not less.

I started choosing roses that belonged here—not the ones that looked perfect in the catalog, but the ones that could survive my mistakes, my neighborhood's heat, my uneven watering, my desperate hands. I learned their names like prayers: Knock Out, Iceberg, New Dawn. I planted them with dirty knees and bleeding palms, and I stopped apologizing to them for not being an expert.

A friend visited and asked, "Why roses? Aren't they so much work?" And I looked at the bed—thorned, tangled, blooming in defiance of everything I'd done wrong—and I said, "Because they don't forgive you. They just keep going."

She didn't understand. She didn't need to.

The roses taught me things the therapist couldn't. That patience isn't soft—it's the hardest discipline there is. That you can cut something back to almost nothing and it will still try. That thorns aren't cruelty; they're boundaries. That bloom doesn't mean you're healed; it just means you're still here, still opening, still willing to be seen even when the world has teeth.

I deadhead in the evenings now, snipping spent flowers above the next strong bud, keeping a bucket beside me so the petals don't rot where they fall. Every clean cut is a promise: You will try again. I will help you try again.

Some mornings I stand at the fence and trace the scars on my hands—thin white lines from thorns I didn't see, calluses from digging, a strange new strength in my grip. I used to hate my hands. Now I look at them and see evidence: I touched something alive. I helped it grow. I bled for it and it bloomed anyway.

The roses don't need me to be perfect. They need me to show up, to listen, to feed them when they're hungry and let them rest when they're tired. They need me to stop performing and just be—flawed, inconsistent, learning as I go.

And on the days when I can't get out of bed, when the weight in my chest returns and Jakarta's noise presses too close, I think about the roses waiting by the fence. Not judging. Not demanding. Just growing in their own rhythm, thorned and honest, teaching me the only lesson that ever mattered:

You don't have to be easy to be worth keeping. You just have to keep trying.

So I do.