When I was younger — middle school, high school — I loved the song “The Rose” sung by Bette Midler. I do not think I knew it was a song for a long time. I saw partial lyrics written somewhere (DeviantArt, the epigraph to a fanfiction? It’s anyone’s guess) and printed them out. They stayed taped to my wall for a while, along with other mixed fanart and quotes (I also remember there was a Zuko and Katara fanart that said “Ship Zutara, we have cookies” and another drawing of the characters in the famous scene from “The Waterbending Scroll” episode that I still have as my Gmail background to this day . . . you don’t grow out of nerd).
Here were the lyrics I knew from the end of the song before I knew it was a song:
When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
In the spring becomes the rose
It does kind of read like something a fourteen-year-old would tape to her wall because she thought it was deep, doesn’t it?
I also associated “the lucky and the strong” with the two main characters in the first novel I ever attempted, a project I co-wrote part of with my best friend and thankfully is deep in the archives. I’m pretty sure I wrote the lucky and strong descriptors directly into the story and then doodled them on the backs of my school notebooks.
Still, the message of hope in the song stands — fourteen or thirty-one, it’s always true the winters end and we can bloom again. Or, just as important, we can be that sun’s love for others.
With Love,
Natalie