“The rose seems too artificial to be worth anything...”

      said Karina. She took another look at the strikingly perfect rose her girlfriend, soon to be the ex-girlfriend, Mim had given her as one last attempt to fix the overwhelming cracks of their relationships. My mother would always say, there’s a difference between the idea of love and the idea of a relationship. Love doesn’t need fixing. Relationships do. Sometimes, it’s impossible to have one and not the other. Other times, it’s impossible to have any of the two. But more commonly, it becomes impossible to have both. Either the relationship leaves first, or love does. Sometimes one lingers when the other is far too far to get back. All that’s left is the memories. The thoughts stay with us. The days left behind in a place to which we can never return, are all we have left.

One would have to be a fool to think Karina was talking of the actual rose itself. Who wouldn’t want to receive a rose at one point or another? Because we all know it isn’t about the rose. The innocent rose has been transformed into a symbol of love. Of recognition. To give one a rose suggests that there is love there. Of course, a suggestion of something does not always mean that truth is involved. And Karina knew that. When she said that the rose seemed too artificial to be worth anything, she wasn’t referring to the rose. She was referring to the love, or in this case what would be more appropriate, “love,” had become synthetic. Artificial. No longer concrete. No longer worthy of her time.
Though the rose committed no sin, at that moment, it had lost all value to Karina. Its symbol was no longer one of truth. That love that Mim had intended to convey with that rose, was a love that was no longer real. It had become artificial.