She's home from the hospital. There was a yellow tulip at her door.

Weeks, months had passed since the disaster. She sat on her patio drinking coffee in the early morning fog and as usual, her eyes fell on the browned, crisp yellow tulip standing rigid in the bud vase on her patio table. She'd let the first frost get it. In fact, she wasn't sure why she still had it out there. She never brought it inside. She knew where it came from.

There was a letter someplace. He never gave it to her, but she knew he wrote one. It was his way to try and say it without words.

Yellow tulip means friendship.

That's what all the books say.

She sat in the quiet, the steam from her mug swirling delicately upward.

How can you be friends with someone who no longer exists? she wondered in thought.

In her world, friends were around, in her orbit, tangible and reciprocating. Most of the time. Since the attack, she had so many......friends.

She would have rather had the letter. She hoped the other woman was beautiful.
Even more so than she.

She hoped it was worth the cavernous abandonment in the hospital. Worth leaving her to doctors, nurses, none of whom filled that void.

The one that was slowly filling now.

With herself.

And the promise of something different. A new year. Someplace after the growing snow and ice and wind and all that other natural stuff that has to arrive before the thaw.

Before everything warms up again.

She didn't miss him much anymore. He was only a memory.

The tulip would eventually turn to dust with the cold.