I once lived two blocks from a row of gardenia bushes that bloomed year-round. For three hundred sixty-five days, those plants continuously produced new flowers from which I would inhale my all-time favorite scent. The smell has the power to hurl me back into the days of my childhood, its exotic fragrance piercing me straight through the heart with an old-familiar joy and sadness that stings bittersweet.

Bittersweet. Isn’t everything?

My eyes, my smile, my lyrics, my melodies, my relationships, my views on life and love and so-called happiness…bittersweet, all of them.

Over-compensating for reality, my attempts to live the saccharine fairytale of Happily Ever After were eventually overtaken by my original stance: In a bittersweet world, all that is born must die.

My gardenia bushes, at first glance, defied the laws of nature. With little more than the temperate ocean air for encouragement, they thrived and always appeared beautiful, inspiring all who gazed upon them and breathed in their heady scent. How easy and safe life could be, insisted their facade. Risking comfort, I looked closer. Sure, the plants as a whole lived on and on, but what of their individual leaves and flowers? Each one had been born as a result of a death, the replacements so very subtle as to provide the illusion of immortality.

How many little pieces and parts had died over the years, contributing crucial yet easily-forgotten details to the ever-growing entity? Did it hurt the plants to feel bits of themselves end? Or had they grown numb to the pain somewhere along the line and reached a state of blissful oblivion, enabling them to fool the world so easily because they’d fooled themselves, too?

In a world where everything – from fruit to flies to hair to hearts – has a cyclical life span, it seems only logical that love does, too.

“True love lasts forever,” protests the purest, most innocent recess of my psyche.

No it doesn’t. True love is the result of two corresponding hearts colliding, fucking, and giving birth to something as delicate and perfect as the individual bud on a gardenia shrub. By some miracle, it receives just enough water, just enough light, just enough air, just enough time to bloom, opening its thick, soft petals to the world in a celebration of its mere existence. With the perfect balance of sustenance and the perfect proximity to elements, the flower lives on and on, unpicked and unharmed. How beautiful! How wondrous! But don’t get arrogant. The cycle must end where it began, and therefore, the flower reaches a point where it can grow no more. Slowly, death creeps in around the edges of its petals, causing the once vibrant bloom to shrivel obediently, shrinking in size until it crumples from its stem to the soil below. What begins as nothing ends as nothing.

From its death, a new birth is able to occur. Another gardenia flower blooms and blossoms. Maybe it’s bigger, smaller, more fragrant, less fragrant, longer-lasting, shorter-lived, picked, or crushed. No matter. Each one is significant in its own way, unique in its shape and growth. And, in one way or another, each one will die. Does that make them any less wondrous while they exist? Can they not be enjoyed and savored and then remembered for their individual relevance long after they are gone?

To approach love in such a way might seem damning to some – why even bother if every relationship is doomed to end? For me, though, that reality makes it all the more romantic. Whether it lasts for four years or forty, “true love” is not synonymous with “eternal bliss.” We as individuals will all die someday, as will those seemingly-constant gardenia shrubs and the Earth itself. Knowing this, should we feel scared or apathetic about living when faced with the unavoidable reality of our eventual demise? Or should we relish every single second of every single day while we are still blessed enough to bloom?

While you meditate on that, I’ll be watering my shrubs and looking forward to a bittersweet new bud emerging when I least expect it.

• Kiss & Tell