Chapter 6: Wilting roses

I was both surprised and fascinated by how much my body was thawing back into life. And one can easily mistake that for falling in love.

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Chapter 6: Wilting roses

The day the Crooked-Smile guy from the office invited me out to dinner, I was overpowered by doubt. The flirting and late-night poem scribbling were a comfortable space to be in. But as I was invited on a real date in real life, my mind went straight to the first thought I had about him ever since we had met. The man was old. I almost called him ‘sir’ once, flustered during one of our first interactions. 

I estimated he was about ten years older than me. We were practically from two different generations. He was charming, sure. He made my stomach flutter when we briefly exchanged a word, sure. But what if he was more ordinary in real life than in my imagined romance? I wasn’t ready to let go of my fantasy. I wanted to spend more late nights daydreaming. I wanted to write more poems, fabricating love stories from words. A mixture of excitement and letdown governed me all week long until Saturday arrived. Fantasy relationships are easier, you only get to live the parts that you choose. The real ones are full of risks. 

On Saturday evening, I met him at the bar of a five-star hotel he picked, for a drink before dinner at the restaurant next-door. He was waiting for me, one elbow resting on the bar top, with his face towards the entrance. His head was tilted on one side watching me as I walked towards him. My feet were rushing my body forwards, I didn’t have much command over them. We became like two magnets as the distance between us decreased. And just like two magnets, I stopped in front of him, unable to get closer and greet him with a kiss on the cheek, as it was customary. I wanted to prolong the moment a little longer, satisfied that my week-long worries had been in vain. 

‘Good evening’, he said and I read in his gaze a combination of gallantry and admiration. If he had more indecent thoughts, they were very well hidden.

The boys I was used to seeing, never said ‘good evening’, but ‘hey’ or ‘what’s up’, no difference between greeting me or their own buddies. Suddenly, they seemed like half-grown teenagers, infantile and repulsive, compared to him. Those boys would also dress in Converse tennis shoes and oversized t-shirts, while this man came to our date dressed in a perfectly fit shirt and a gray cashmere pullover carelessly thrown over his broad shoulders. Cary Grant was in the house. 

As he kissed me hello, holding me a couple of extra seconds, I briefly touched his arm covered in cashmere. The tingling down my spine increased by a notch. It made me stand up a little bit taller and slow down my moves to match his. We had entered the classic courtship dance between male and female. But this wasn’t some bland, overused salsa move. This was the beginning of tango. 

The large age gap between us, that extra decade I assumed he had over me, started to decrease after the first hour together. It was the first time we were exchanging more than a few words. At times he had a boyish spark in his eyes when talking about surfing the waves of California or riding his motorbike on highways in the Alps. Then he became again the gallant man when changing to a more serious topic. When the time came for our dinner reservation, we tangoed our way from the bar to the restaurant next door. 

He was listening to me tell my own stories with a patience one has when the clocks have stopped and time stands still. And as I was talking, my veins started getting warmer. It was as if the lava of a volcano was pouring through them, replacing my own thin blood with fire. As much as I enjoyed the evening, in part I knew I was playing a game. I’d watch myself from the outside, a flawless Audrey Hepburn impersonation, and I’d barely recognize myself. He inspired me to speak in a different voice, to use my hands more graciously, to be more aware of the movement of my fingers. A couple of times I must have touched the side of my head in search of the silk scarf Audrey used to wear. It wasn’t there, but I was playing the part. 

He knew his way around the wine list too. He had decided what type of wine he wanted me to try. I picked the food but not before he suggested we try the grilled poussin, which he’d enjoyed before at that place. It was as if he took my hand leading me through all the hidden nooks of that restaurant in search of all the treasures. And that evening I enjoyed being led. My belly relaxed and my cheeks started to hurt from all the smiles. My veins continued to feel warm throughout the night, the scorching heat from the beginning mellowing into a warm awakening of all my senses. I felt alive again on the inside. Alive as I hadn’t been in a long time. 

That evening I forgot that he was old, that he was from another generation. I forgot I had almost called him ‘sir’ once. He helped me put fantasy aside for one evening and step into reality. There was the inner feeling of being comfortable and trusting the person in front of you. There was the playful exchange above a vase with miniature red roses separating us. And the delight of the taste buds thanks to the fresh poussin and the handpicked wine. The definition of a good life. Or maybe just the definition of life itself, which I seemed to have forgotten, during so many months of slowly dying in an unfit marriage. I was both surprised and fascinated by how much my body was thawing back into life. And one can easily mistake that for falling in love. I was falling in love again, but not with him. I was falling in love with myself, with life itself. 

The white vase filled with miniature red roses between us reminded me of my own rosebush, wilting away in my former rooftop garden. As my partnership was dying, so was my rosebush as I didn’t have enough energy to tend to it. The jasmine and even the palm tree followed suit, drying up the life of the garden. Thankfully, the lemon tree didn’t need water regularly, otherwise the lemons were bound to start shriveling. And just like my plants, my own body had started slowly dying too. And now, spending a charming evening with my colleague, an erotic air surrounding us like a silk scarf, I realized how wilted I had been on the inside. My body had hardened up in order to put up with an unfit life situation. The steel cherry kernel that occasionally smashed its way through my brain was one such sign of hardening. It had been my way of coping for years. But that evening I got reminded again of what being alive felt like. That rooftop rosebush might have died, but I would go on living. 

After dinner, I stayed up late that night not writing poems as usual, but daydreaming about bits of the evening, as if recollecting the scenes of a ‘50s movie. The guy wasn’t as old as I thought at first. I still didn’t know his age, but I felt less inclined to call him ‘sir’ or think of him as coming from a different generation. 

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The office became my favorite place to be in. There I was, a blooming rose again. My heels got higher, my suit jackets got smarter. It was as if I was trying to get closer to his age, to his generation, through my clothes, my gestures, my outer appearance. 

In the next few weeks, I was slapped awake by how much my body was indeed alive. Wrapped in my own mix of dramas and euphories, I didn’t realize just how much I was also aging. Until the day I took a closer look at myself from the outside. 

On what seemed to be an uneventful Thursday morning, I received an email announcing that the professional photos I had done were ready. We had organized a photoshoot for the entire department, in an effort to present a unified image of the team. I clicked on the link to download them, eager to see how they turned out. When the folder finally unzipped and opened, I was disappointed to see they had made a mistake and sent me someone else’s photos. But just after another blink and a glance over the laptop screen again, I pushed the chair and myself backwards, my eyes widening. It was me in the photos, and not someone else. 

I inhaled but the air wasn’t going in. I closed the folder and also my eyes for a brief moment, as if I could undo what I’d just seen. I opened the folder and one of the photos again and it seemed liquefied. At times it looked like me, then it was melting back into someone else. A woman whom I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t comprehend how I saw myself and at the same time I didn’t recognize what I saw. 

The photos showed a woman with the first signs of aging. The baby skin was gone, fine lines spread out like claws around her eyes. The photo must have been scratched. Her poise wasn’t that of a young girl’s, but that of a mature woman’s. There was a disconnect between who I felt I was from the inside out and the woman looking at me from the photos. Even though I was already 35, if someone would have asked me suddenly how old I was, I needed a second to remember if I had turned 30 or not. Maybe I was stuck in the past, in the time when I was happy, unconsciously wishing to freeze the last few years. Of course I knew the age that was written on my ID, but I wasn’t aware of the reality of being in my mid-thirties. 

The colleague who organized the photoshoot stopped by my desk to ask me if I had seen the photos. I told her I had, but my face must have been a shade whiter than a healthy person’s. She asked me if there was anything wrong, did I not like them. Before I could answer, she started warning me the photographer had been expensive and there was no more budget to redo them if that was what I wanted to request. I showed her the photos, feeling my cheeks burning with shame. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, saying I turned out really nice, with the contrast between my red jacket and the greenery we used as a background. 

‘Do you think they represent me?’, I asked, stressing on the ‘me’ part but in a muted voice, hoping no one around would hear. 

‘Well, yeah!’, her high pitched tone resounded. ‘They totally say manager of my own team, yeah they do!’ She teased me about my recent promotion, winking at me. 

She took my question to mean if they represented me and my new position. She didn’t get that I meant if they represented the real me, the young girl I saw in the mirror. 

‘No, but I mean, do you think I look like myself in them?’, I insisted.  

She started tugging at one of her long earrings, slightly frowning at the laptop screen, after which she answered more sure of herself than I’d ever seen her. 

‘Yeah of course, they’re totally you. And since you dress up every day anyway, the image really fits how we see you here. Don’t worry about it, they totally represent you.’

Totally. Right. 

I was ashamed to tell her I saw in them a woman years older than how I perceived myself. I was ashamed to tell her I thought I looked decrepit. Plain old. I saw a nonexistent white strand of hair, I thought my teeth were yellowing, decaying. I was ashamed of all the wrinkles I counted on the photo, even without zooming in on them. But then, contradicting my own thought, I remembered that each of them told a story about my life. Each was a wrinkle of laughter or sorrow, they made up who I had become until then. 

It took me a few good days before starting to like those photos. I checked them out obsessively. My feelings shifted from disbelief and shame to acceptance and endearment. At home I’d look at myself in the mirror and then back at the photo. The mirror, the photo. Until the two started looking more and more alike. I was slowly starting to close the gap between who I thought I was and who I was showing the world to be. 

That photographer helped me take a better look at myself. And while facing the reality of my age and my outer appearance, somehow my office crush didn’t seem so old anymore. Somehow we were now part of the same generation. And probably he wasn’t even ten years older than me.

Recognizing my real self started with shock and ended with compassion — a more suitable feeling for someone who was falling in love with life all over again.

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Read next: Chapter 7 - America is my home

Chapter 7: America is my home