Rose at 8:06 a.m.

For the last twenty-five years, the scent of roses has always meant love to me. It has carried nothing but positive connotations - love, affection, beauty, tenderness. A rose has always smelt like something warm and beautiful. Even Blake, in The Sick Rose, writes, “O Rose thou art sick”, drawing upon the rose as a symbol of beauty, innocence, purity and life.

But today, something about that scent was different.

This morning, I was riding my scooter to the metro, as I do on most days. It was an ordinary morning, nothing particularly unusual about it, until I suddenly caught the smell of roses. It lasted only for a couple of seconds, but it was distinct enough for me to notice. There were no roses around me, and I couldn't tell where the scent had come from. While riding, I twisted my right wrist to look at my watch. I wear my watch on my right hand, the same hand on the accelerator, but I couldn't see the time because the watch had turned to the other side. I took my hand off the accelerator for a moment, turned my wrist, and looked.

8:06 a.m.

The feeling was so strange that I immediately wanted to know the exact time it had happened. I wanted to hold on to that particular moment - to be able to say, this was when it happened. I badly wanted to make note of the time because it struck me as strange that the scent of roses, which had meant love to me for all these years, could, within a fraction of a second of its fragrance reaching my nostrils, make my brain think of one word:

Death.

It wasn't a thought that followed the smell, nor was it an association I consciously made. Somehow, the scent itself seemed to carry the quality of death - something I cannot explain, but somehow knew.

And yet, strangely, the sweetness of the rose had not disappeared. It was still soft. Still delicate. Still unmistakably the scent of a rose.

That was perhaps the strangest part of it.

The fragrance reached me gently, almost tenderly, the way the scent of a rose always does. It did not arrive with anything harsh or foul. There was no bitterness to it, no decay, nothing that should have made me think of death. If anything, it was beautiful. 

And yet, beneath that sweetness, there was something I could only describe as Death.

It felt as though Death had borrowed the perfume of a rose and passed quietly beside me. As though something lifeless had dressed itself in the fragrance of something alive.

For those few seconds, the rose did not smell like love, though it still smelt exactly like a rose.

It smelt like something beautiful carrying something terrible within it.

A sweetness with Death beneath it.

A sweet-smelling death.

And perhaps that is what unsettled me most - not that a rose reminded me of death, but that, for those few seconds at 8:06 a.m., death itself seemed to smell like a rose.