I wrote this story during late night sessions in 1990. I had no intention to write a book. I simply had a profound need to explore the characters of Guy and David as they found one another at a time when so many of us were dying. These two characters presented themselves as two absolutely different types of men at a time when Blacks and Whites were suffering the same scourge of Aids. I met them accidentally in the silent night and they soon owned the space which had been mine but now was clearly and passionately their world. Page upon page they wrote in my mind and in my heart stacks of a manuscript that had no direction so much as a willingness to go to the recesses of each of their minds and struggles and in the process encountered love. Their dialogue became a kind of opera. It had the passion of a deeply human experience and in the telling and the conflicts and the explorations, they found love. David had a song and Guy desired heroically to listen to David sing that song. Overwhelmed by Aids and the scattered pages of the nightly written agonies, I locked them up in an old piece of luggage. For all these years it hummed quietly until I heard it close to my ears, as close as David's breath, and decided to share the story. I exhumed from that old luggage those pages as I walked in The Rose Garden. The roses were like the love affair of David and Guy as they shared the short lives of the roses. Love, like the roses, has a short life that lasts forever in memories of pain and joy....