Remember that guy who said he would walk five hundred miles, and then five hundred more, just to be the guy who walked a thousand miles to fall at her door? Talk about unrealistic love.

Which young person dreamed up a grand romance only to crash down onto the ebony rocks of a fearsome shore when they were confronted with the harsh realisation that it wasn’t true, that it never would be?

He rolled his eyes at this. Here she goes again. Soon she would lament that he had not given her a handwritten card for their anniversary. He braced himself, and there it came. There it was. A small sharp sentence covered in thorns, aimed expertly at him, and thrown with exceptional accuracy. Why, she was a master at this trick. It hit its target alright, and it was laced with poison, for he immediately tasted something sour in his mouth, and a little ghoul settled itself around his heart and squeezed it maliciously.

He threw his fair share of thorns, too, he supposed. He laced them with poison also. Sometimes the green poison of jealousy. Sometimes the fiery poison of fury. Sometimes it was just plain old hurt.

The hurt we give. Without thinking, mostly. Not realising it escalates into something larger. Like a giant saucer hanging ominously over the earth, it feels too late to take the thorns back because they build up into something elephantine. A literal elephant in the room.

And you pick at it and pick at it each day and it’s like a fungi, exploding into something else.

One day he wasn’t tired though. He stood by the window one morning. It was exceptionally cloudy, but exceptionally beautiful, because the sunlight fought majestically that day for its glorious life, and lit up the world in a hazy, wintry light, shining through the thin shroud of cloud, and giving life to the dead wintry earth below.

And he realised something, when he saw her step out into the back garden with her basket of freshly washed clothes piled high, to hang in the frigid air and become cold and crisp. Her clothes and his. She began pegging the laundry onto the washing line. Her blouse, his trousers, his shirt, a pair of thick white socks he got for her last winter because two of her toes refused to circulate blood in the cold and became numb. Hers and his. She glanced up at the window, saw him, smiled. He smiled back.

And he realised that the thorns were a prerequisite to the bed of rosebushes they had built together.