✝Forget-me-not
6.26.26
I got my first flower when I was still a child, back when the world felt softer and every small thing mattered. We grew side by side, tangled in the same sunlight, laughing at the same jokes no one else understood. We were inseparable, not because we had to be, but because we chose to be, over and over again.
I carried that flower with me everywhere. Not into places where the air was too heavy or the light too cruel. I was always careful. I thought I was its guardian, its only safe place. I gave it water even when the soil was still damp. I gave it words even when silence would have been better. I was so afraid it would wither, fade, slip through my fingers like sand, so I held on tighter. Too tight.
And sometimes, when my heart got too loud and my hands too restless, I would speak in a language only it could understand. I didn't mean to be harsh. I just wanted to be heard. I wanted to be sure it knew how much I cared. But I never asked if it wanted to be cared for that way. I never asked if it wanted to be held at all.
One evening, I looked at it and I said the words. I told it I loved it. I told it I would do anything to keep it by my side. I said: "I won't be able to live without you". It heard that from me before. It wasn't the first time. But then I started crying. Not the quiet kind, the kind that shakes your whole body and leaves you breathless. I cried like a child who had just learned that love doesn't always mean being loved back. I cried because I was tired of carrying something so heavy all by myself. I cried because I wanted the flower to finally see me. To notice that I was wilting too.
But the flower didn't move. Didn't lean closer.
It had never comforted me before. Never reached out when I was drowning. It was always beautiful, always distant, always just out of reach. And yet I kept loving it. Kept watering it. Kept pretending that if I gave enough, it would finally give something back.
That evening, something cracked inside me. A small, fragile thing. I thought that maybe, just maybe, the flower would see my tears and respond. That it would finally notice I was dying. That it would pour something back into me. But it didn't. It just stood there, silent and green, untouched by my sadness.
That's when I understood: I had been giving and giving and giving, hoping for a drop in return. But some flowers were never meant to water you. Some flowers were only ever meant to be admired from a distance.
The flower is gone now. Not dead, just gone. It chose distance over me. It chose silence over my voice. And no matter how many times I turn the memory over in my hands, I still can't find the moment where I lost it. Maybe I never had it to begin with. Maybe I only loved the idea of it and it knew that before I did.
I still don't know why the flower never liked me back.
But I let the flower go because it asked me to. And for the first time, I turned toward the sun not to find someone to water me, but to learn how to grow on my own. As if it was that simple...
The flower never loved me back, but it made me grow anyway.