Before I knew about the rose world, I believed in things right in front of me, things I could touch and hold to my chest, manipulate with my hands and mind, and certainly not fairytales or fantasy worlds like the ones in childhood stories, but I was just folding the laundry with my back turned when I heard a loud tap on the window, so naturally I walked away from the socks and the fuzzy blanket popping and sizzling with static cling and moved toward the window to investigate the noise since it was just three days ago that I had rescued a bright red cardinal who smashed beak-first into the glass and lay stunned in my hand for over an hour before regaining consciousness and flying away to his mate in the curly filbert tree, and watching him lying there so helpless reminded me of how I curled my own small bones into a fetal position after the abuse, trying to slow my racing pulse and pretending to be asleep so my father would leave me alone and stop touching me,
so when I approached the sound of the tap, the last thing I expected to see was a red bird the size of an ancient oak, so large in fact, his weight on the railing shook the entire deck and his black eyes, the size of dinner plates, stared into my soul beckoning me to come outside, sweeping his massive wings and tucking me gently underneath, so that everything went black in the warmth of his sheltering feathers, and I had the sensation of flying but didn’t know precisely how we had arrived on the tip of the rose petal, a soft yellow color like the ones my grandmother used to grow, except this one was different because it was larger than the house, dwarfing the giant bird in comparison, and I of course, was no larger than an ant,
and I forgot all about the hands that had roamed like panthers all over my child body, and the fear left me, the fear that had been my constant companion since those dreadful nights in my childhood bed, and I laid gently on the silky carpet of the flower’s petals, lulled to sleep by bird lullabies and the wind rocking me and the aromatic scent of rose water on the rosebud pillow under my head, and when I awoke later from a deep slumber, I was shocked at how much I had grown, and I felt strong enough to climb on the back of the giant bird, digging my fingers into feathers the color of clotting blood and we soared above the clouds so that I could see how small the world was beneath me, and there was nothing to fear and no reason to hide,
and no one was more surprised than me when I found myself back on my porch, standing in the pouring rain watching the birds empty the feeder of the last sunflower seed, and there I was calling out to the cardinal who had flown me to paradise just to let me sleep in peace without nightmares, without memories or flashbacks, and I marveled that this same bird had been so small and so fragile in the cusp of my palm just weeks before, and seeing him like this, so courageous and resilient after all he had suffered, gave me great hope, and what happened next was perhaps the biggest surprise of all, because I wasn’t ready when he sang me a song so lovely and so true, but yet there I was singing along with the lyrical story of me saving him and him saving me, the story of two tiny hearts full of gratitude in a world of giants.