Mother's Roses

The cell always feels smaller at night.

Not because the walls move—though sometimes it seems like they do—but because the mind has nowhere left to run. The noise dies down, the voices fade, and what’s left is you… and everything you’ve ever tried not to think about.

I was sitting on the lower bunk in a three-man cell, elbows on my knees, staring at nothing in particular, when a strange thought crossed my mind. I had just read something light, almost silly—a post about some odd little mud figure shaped like a flower. It should’ve meant nothing. Just another piece of passing noise.

But it stuck.

And for reasons I didn’t expect, it made me ask myself a question I hadn’t considered in years: When was the last time I deliberately held onto something that felt good?

Not distraction. Not escape. Not survival.

Something real.

The answer didn’t come easy. At first, there was nothing but static. Then, slowly, like something pushing up through deep water, an image formed.

Roses.

My mother’s roses.

I didn’t expect that. Out of everything my life has been—everything it turned into—that’s what surfaced. Not a person. Not a moment of triumph. Not even a memory tied to anything I’ve done right or wrong.

Just a patch of earth… and a cluster of flowers.

I was a strange-looking kid. There’s no gentle way to say it. My eyes were badly crossed, my ears stuck out like they had somewhere better to be, and whoever decided how I should look kept me in a crewcut and stiff, straight pants while every other kid around me seemed to belong to a different world entirely—long hair, bell bottoms, easy laughter.

If childhood is where you learn how to fit in, then I never got the lesson. I was the wrong shape from the start—a square peg dropped into a place that only made room for round ones.

So I learned something else instead.

I learned how to disappear.

Not completely. Just enough.

At night, when the house went quiet and I was sure everyone else had drifted off, I’d slip out through the window as carefully as I could manage. There was a certain kind of silence in those hours—thick, almost protective. Like the world wasn’t paying attention for a little while.

That’s when I’d go to her roses.

They were big. Bigger than they had any right to be. Thick stems, heavy thorns, blooms that seemed almost too full, too alive. I was told she planted them herself, before she died. An accident, they said. I was three years old when it happened—too young to carry a real memory of her, too old to escape the absence.

So I made something in between.

I’d bring a blanket, lay it out beneath those bushes, and stretch out under them like I belonged there. The ground would be cool, the air damp with dew, and the scent of those roses… it filled everything. It was soft, but strong. Gentle, but constant.

And in my mind, that was her.

Not a face. Not a voice.

A presence.

I believed—because I needed to—that those roses were connected to her somehow. That if she planted them, then some part of her stayed with them. And if I lay there long enough, quiet enough, I could feel it. I could feel her.

For a little while, I wasn’t the odd kid who didn’t fit anywhere.

I was just… held.

The thorns didn’t scare me. If anything, they felt like protection. Like nothing could get through them without permission. Petals would fall sometimes—soft, silent—and I’d watch them drift down like they were meant just for me.

I didn’t have the words for it back then, but I understand it now.

That was refuge.

Not a place you go to escape the world—but a place that reminds you you’re still part of it.

Sitting here now, years later, in a place built to strip things down to their barest form, I realize something I didn’t expect.

I’ve spent most of my life remembering the hard edges.

But the soft ones are still there too.

You just have to be willing to look for them.

Sometimes, they’re hidden in the strangest places.

Sometimes, they’re waiting under a rose bush at three in the morning.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, they find their way back to you—even in a prison cell.

Story by James Dollar