今天看了一出电影，有感而发，于是有了以下这个小故事。
Once upon a spring, a small, delicate bud appeared on the top of a rose stem. It was the first bud this stem growed, so she showed it off to the sun proudly every morning like it would become the most beautiful rose in the bush.
“Would it be red? Or would it be white?” buzzed the bees as they flew by.
“You will find out soon enough”, said the thorns, irritated at being disturbed.
One breezy morning, as the sun started waking up all lives beneath him, the bees noticed something unusual. The rose bud cracked open, revealing a tiny velvety petal in the lightest shade of blue.
“Oh my goodness!” exclaimed the bees, already crowding the bush in amazement. Soon they started a heated debate about what it would taste like.
“How is this possible? It isn’t even due in three weeks, and in blue too!” Now the thorns were stunned as well.
No one was more surprised than the stem. It was nothing like what the other stems told her. She didn’t know how to react other than carrying on cautiously. Blooming early didn’t mean it would not grow up normally. She would love “Blue”, as she named it, all the same even if it turned out to be black.
Since the bud didn’t show anything sign of rosett virus which would turn the leaves or twigs into an unusually bright red, everyone thought it just needed a couple more days.
A week passed by, but the bud showed no progress. Instead, the blue petal started to darken with a tint of yellow, like the color dying leaves took on before they fell off the bush. It also seemed to have gained weight, swaying on top of the stem as the bees came by to make their rounds.
“Well, it sure looks to be growing. Maybe it’s not blue after all. Don’t apples change colors as they ripen?” said the bees, all the more curiously.
The thorns didn’t speak. They knew better than spreading bad news before they happened. Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t turn out the way they thought if they didn’t put it into words. Besides, the stem would be devastated if she learned about it. Let there be hope, prayed the thorns collectively.
Their prayer went unanswered. The rose bud kept turning brown as days went by, and it never looked up to the sun again since they day it cracked open, no matter how hard the stem tried to hold it up.
The bees were disappointed. Now they would never find out what blue rose tasted like. But soon they went on with their business as usual, turning to other healthy roses in full bloom.
The thorns, having seen this hundreds of times, continued to pass their idle days in the bush. The only way to get through this was to wait for the bud to fall off and start over, they said to the stem, trying to be helpful.
The stem sobbed nonstop after the bud fell off. It was like part of her also died with it. But she was also anxious to start over as a redemption of the loss. If I grew another bud quickly, I might be able to capture the spirit of Blue before it decomposed into the soil, thought the stem.
Time went by fast in the garden. Four weeks later, the stem did grow two more healthy roses with only a week in between. However, she found it difficult to wiped out the memory of this blue bud. Not because it was a unique color, but because every bud is different. For the stem, grieve never dies, because nothing kills the pain of losing something so dear to her heart. So instead of forgetting, she buried the memory of Blue in her root as reminder of how precious the two new roses were.
