Blood Orange Periphery

26. Pretty Prickly

The year was 1263, and as the Scots slept, Norse invaders removed their footwear: to better their chances of a successful invasion, or so the story goes. But as they crept closer, one of the invaders stepped on a thistle, and his cry of pain alerted the Scots to the attack. Rising up, they defeated the enemy. And so, in gratitude, the thistle became the national emblem of Scotland.

The year was 2015, and we rented a flat on Collins Street, Edinburgh, for my mum's fiftieth. The landlady's name was Bennett and oh the irony. I laughed —I had to. Friday evening, pain interrupted my reading and cleaved the kitchen in two. Bad cramps, heavy periods, old chums of mine, made worse by ruining my underwear on the way upstairs. I stumbled into the ensuite, my body curling in on itself. I remember squeezing my eyes shut. How uneven the tiles felt beneath my hands, how the teal-painted walls seeped behind closed eyelids. The bathroom became the surface of memories, ones that never stop bleeding. I grew small there, smaller and smaller until time folded. Years passed in an hour.
It would have looked like a large menstrual clot if not for the distinctive shape.
When I came back downstairs to say goodnight, my father asked if I was alright. I did what we all do when we want to disappear. Yeah, I said, just cramps. The next day, we visited Edinburgh Castle. I bought a thistle pendant, something small to hold on to.

The year was 2019, and I got my second tattoo. For them, whoever they might have been. For me, and for the country that cradled my loss. To the naked eye, it was just a weed.

The year was 2023, and my sister-in-law and I had big plans. A children's book. I'd write the words, she'd draw the illustrations. A story about a thistle that refuses the definitions others give it. What makes a flower a flower? What stops a weed from being one? Who decides these things? The answers weren't for the thistle, nor for the child who might read it. They were for the wild spaces in me that refuse definition, that grow despite everything.

The year is 2024, and I'm typing this from a hotel room in Edinburgh. We never did finish the book. It sits one-third done, abandoned like so many things my chemically imbalanced brain has left behind. Lover of many, a master of none. I start and start and let summer slip into autumn. I'll be joining my girl soon. I wonder now, sitting here, if she would have liked the story—the girl I never held, the girl who has held me since that evening I spent years in a teal-painted bathroom.

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On top of a mountain in a faraway land
Sits an empty castle, beautiful and grand
Once home to a king and queen, now left behind
A place where legends and lore are intertwined

In the castle garden, magic weaves through each vine
Flowers sing darling songs, trees twist and twine
At the farthest corner, where the wall starts to crumble
A purple prickly bursts forth from the stone jumble

Thistle wakes with a stretch, glistening in dew
And peers around, soaking in the view
Their eyes land on a fellow bloom
With petals like velvet, bright as a boon

"Greetings!" Thistle shouts at Red down below. "What a lovely day to grow!"

"Good morning!" Red answers with a cheerful grin. "Does the grass not look greener than yesterday's spin?"

"It does indeed! And how wonderful it smells, how awful sweet! As good as us flowers in the summer heat!"

"Us flowers? But you're a weed," Red declares with ease. And the words make Thistle stop swaying in the breeze

"Why do you say that?" Thistle asks with a frown, "When I too wear a thorny crown?"

Red shrugs, "That is the way things have been. Not all can be flowers, not everyone can win."

"Well, I see things differently," Thistle says, firm as can be.
"What makes a flower a flower? What stops a weed from being one? When just like you, I blossom in the sun?"