They were supposed to be yellow…

I trudged into the building, my tired body struggling, my eyes still burning and bloodshot from hours of crying.

My boss wanted to know what was wrong so I told him. As was his way, he shrugged it off and told me there were other fish in the sea or some crap like that.

But he was supposed to be MY fish. Forever. I had known it from the start. Or so I thought. He apparently didn’t want Forever so I told him goodbye. I set him free…

I put my purse in the file cabinet and walked out on the floor acting ready to sell furniture. Maybe if I told my customers my sob story they would have pity on me and be inclined to buy more from me.

What I really wanted to do was go back to my one-bedroom apartment and crawl back under the covers and bawl some more for the life I thought was going to be. For the relationship I longed to have back.

The last thing I wanted to do was put on a fake smile and act like I was happy to see strangers with good credit scores to use toward sofas and pillow-top mattresses.

I leaned over the counter waiting for my “up” when a man walked in with a large bouquet of flowers covering his face. The assistant manager, my friend Mac, signed for them, looked at the card and then at me.

“They’re for you.”

“No way,” I said.

“Yup.”

And there sat a dozen garnet-colored roses from the man I’d just broken up with.

I called him with anger in my voice, tears welling again. I asked him why he would do such a thing. Why would he send me a beautiful bouquet of roses that were the color of LOVE?

His reply, “They were supposed to be yellow – for friendship.”

“Well, they are not,“ I said. “They are as red as the blood that courses through my veins.”
Then I hung up. And cried. Again.

This week we had to give a memory of the color RED. 


This story is about me and my husband. In retrospect I’m glad the roses were red and not yellow because I take that as a sign to this day, that Tim and I would end up together, as we have. He was trying to cheer me up while we were broken up for a bit, before he decided there was no way he could live without me…. 😉