Flowers and Fruit flavoured rum

I used to say that if my partner wanted to let me know that they love me, and they didn’t have the words, all they had to do was give me black roses. As you might imagine, they are difficult to find but one time, one man tried to give me black roses. Because black roses do not grow in nature, you can get white roses and spray paint them black, or soak them in black dye over time and the petals will change colour (all of this, I came to find out after the attempt had been made to give me black roses). It was when I turned 25 and the man I love had taken me on this nice birthday weekend away at The Lensbury in London. We took a motorboat unto the Thames on the morning of the 30th. We were blasting Burna Boy’s Bank on It as we went and even though I didn’t have a hundred grand, I was yelling ‘you can put a hundred grand ‘pon it’ as if I did. Later that evening, we got dressed for dinner and when we got there, there was a bouquet of flowers on the table, and he began to explain to me the attempt at dying the white roses black and how he wished he had just sprayed them because, after 24 hours of soaking the rose stems, only the base of the petals were beginning to change colour. When my birthday cake came, and I blew the candle out, I wished that it would never end.

I must say that the entire experience of that birthday was beautiful but my roses stuck out the most because I remember I had mentioned but once that black roses would be the greatest expression of love in my opinion. I got a listener and a doer. I often think about how much time he spent with the hotel management making sure that my gifts stayed hidden away from our hotel room so I would not stumble upon them (more like snoop to find them because I am a real curious cat). I wonder how careful he had to be with the dye and the flowers, convincing the attendants that it must be guarded carefully and presented at my dinner table for maximum effect. For me, it was the attention to detail. Up until this time I had not had the fortune of love so deliberate that tasted so good on the tongue. Love before this man was like regular rum but with him, it was like drinking fruit flavoured rum from the Caribbean even if you have never been to the Caribbean. You must find a love like that, and when you do, you must get comfortable with the idea that you can be completely ruined by it because if it goes away, you will never be the same.