“He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.”
It is likely this Persian proverb predates the melodic cautions of Poison’s 1988 power ballad “Every Rose Has Its Thorns.” Still, it is unsurprising that this sentiment reigns across continents and across cultures. After all, who among us does not expect?
We may expect the best or the worst or something in between, but we all expect. Yet even the most pessimistic of us— and as a self-proclaimed pessimist, I feel confident in saying this— expect perfection.
The deep reds of the rose’s petals cloud our eyes, the thorn the furthest thing from our minds. And this holds true because this rose, this object of our expectations, is not always the same shade of red. It can be bright and beautiful, like a dream job you simply knew was yours or that girl that just felt different. But it can also be dark and decaying, like a friend you will not miss or that celebrity whose death you sort of saw coming. The affirmation of our expectations is perfection. It is a rose, no matter the kind. Its thorns are reality, providing us with our own shades of red. Blood drips down our arms and somewhere along its journey it has taught us a lesson.
Nothing is perfect.
Take the good with the bad.
Temper your expectations.
But what Persian proverbs and 80’s rock songs fail to see is that our expectations need no tempering. Often, they are already tempered. And it is the satisfaction of these expectations that sends rose petals flying down, no thorns in sight.
I see reds. But I need to see more.
I need to see reds that teach me about disappointment, about perspective, about privilege.
Expectations are vantage points, and hindsight is twenty-twenty, but by 2020, I expect nothing will have changed.
I will still be expecting, and that is about all I expect at this point. And when I am inevitably right, an assertion born not of unabashed confidence but of ample experience expecting, I will have my rose.
I will have my rose and my arm will be clean. Nowadays, I see the thorns. I even aim for them as I grasp for every flower. And yet the thorns must not see me.
There was a girl, because I do not pretend this story is any different from the rest, and she was a rose and she had a thorn. In fact, I will call her Rose with a capital ‘R’ because she wore a pretty red lipstick that alway left her lips moist and because I will always think of her in terms of this analogy, even as it clearly begins to overstay its welcome. But when I reached for this particular Rose, I saw the most beautiful shades of red run down my arm.
Blood had come to teach me, or so I thought.
Rose and her thorns. They were what Bret Michaels was talking about! They were here to reshape my expectations, or perhaps eradicate them altogether. And yet as the blood kept dripping and I began to worry if it would ever stop, I felt something I have felt for a long time.
I felt the same.
And perhaps that is the lesson.
Yes, you must acknowledge the thorn to get to the rose and yes, every rose indeed has its own thorn but to expect anything from this rose or from this thorn is to expect something to come into your life and illuminate the darkness or block out the light. But there is light and dark and there are roses and thorns and there are a million more things.
And things, well, that is all they will ever really be.