It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
The Little Prince
You don’t stick hundreds of roses in the sand at dawn on New Year’s Day because you’re well-adjusted. You do it because something broke open inside you, or because you needed to make something beautiful before the year could grind you down again, or because, and this is the real shit, you understood that the gesture itself, the sheer stupid gorgeous futility of it, was the only honest response to whatever wreckage December left behind.
Because here’s the thing about roses on a beach: the ocean doesn’t give a fuck about your symbolism. It’s going to take every single one of those flowers and drag them under, petals scattering like the promises we make ourselves when we’re drunk or desperate or both. But maybe that’s exactly the point. Maybe whoever did this knew that permanence is a con, that the only thing that matters is that they were there at sunrise, alone probably, hands freezing, cramming stems into wet sand while the Pacific roared its indifference at their back.
It’s a punk rock move disguised as romance, this magnificent waste, this refusal to let beauty be practical or lasting. It’s saying: here, world, here’s something fragile and doomed and completely unnecessary, and I’m giving it to you anyway because the alternative is going numb, and numb is death.
That’s why someone does it. Because they’re still fighting.