When Rose was four, she blew the seeds off the very last dandelion puff in the yard. She looked and looked for another one and cried when she realized they were gone.

When she was eleven, her best friend moved away and she was sure the world was ending. Either that or she would be alone for the rest of her life.

When she was fifteen, she started keeping bouquets of dead flowers in her room because she couldn't bear to throw them away. Her mother told her to look up the word "ephemeral" in the dictionary.

    –adjective: lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory.
    

She thought it was the most depressing word she had ever learned.

When Rose was seventeen, she met a boy who said he would love her forever and never leave. "I love you too," she whispered.

He left six months later. She went home and cried and told her parents the news a few days later.

A year later, she left the new baby with her parents for the afternoon and went and got "ephemeral" tattooed on her wrist in big block letters to hide her accumulation of scars.

Sometimes on hot summer days, you can see her outside with her little girl, teaching her daughter to blow dandelion seeds into the wind.