Dear Purple Rose,
The Rose of the Moon
Have I told you I used to wear flowers? Well, I did, on my lapel.
They use to be roses mostly, like you. Red as riches and white as weeping. The red and white soon stung, no more so than the white.
I will tell you of the purple.
I wore other flowers sometimes. And with the flowers, I integrated them into my early ‘poets look’ when I did open mic gigs as a performance poet. But the purple rose was for something different.
You see, I wore purple because of the novel I was writing.
“The King of Purple Moon’ was a comedy sci-fi adventure, about a young man trapped on a purple moon all his life with his dad, until he departed and he was left in a tangled love with a princess that crashed there. A purple rose was featured in the plot.
I finished the first draft of the novel near the end of 2014. I have not looked back much at it since.
Why purple? Purple for the sands of the moon. Purple for the spirit. Purple for the not quite red and the not quite blue.
I got the purple roses from a local florist I liked to go to, owned by someone loosely connected to a person I knew in a writing group.
I wore the flower when reading from the novel at literature events in my home town in Wakefield, during the Art Walk (A wonderful event where places in town are open for art-related events), including Westgate Studios and at the Chantry Chapel of St Mary the Virgin, both in Wakefield.
But I also wore the rose at other places, as I became proud of adorning it, mainly on my suit jacket.
It was fake, of course, but my love for them was not. Funny how that goes.
During that time, my life was blossoming and growing as if through chaotic cracks in the pavement, due to my mental health and the road my life travelled through. I lived in different mental health facilities, rocketing from one to another. I only bring this up, to mention how I came across the picture of the angel and the rose.
She was seemingly waiting for me, in the place I lived that had a castle at the top of the hill. Dressed in black, in prayer, large white wings stretched upward and curling inward above her head, a purple rose by the bottom of her robes.
Maybe it was just a coincidence. But in my wonderings about my life, or that any life, in fact, could point towards any sense, being that synchronistic, narrative or even divine, that stood out to me.
Storms hit afterwards, and I went through what at times I thought was a literal hell. After coming back from one stormy place I retrieved things from the one down from the castle before moving onwards to another, farther afield. And there was the angel with the purple rose.
And they let me have the picture.
Which I still have now, in my flat in my home town which I have lived in for the past five or so years. I may not have you, my purple rose, but she still has her purple rose.
