She had never received the flowers not even once;
not even in the hollow pauses
where a girl is supposed to be met with gentle surprise.
The world passed by hands filled with everything but her name,
but she... she grew a garden inside her ribs slowly, shyly,
tending the soil that no one had asked for.
She planted gestures in the shape of light carried rain in her breath
and named each bloom after feelings no one had stayed long enough to feel.
Not one rose was ever placed in her palm
but she remembered what it must have felt like
so precisely, that the memory bloomed before the moment ever came.
She was the silence after "I forgot",
the hush that grew vines in a vase left empty.
She whispered her own fragrance into every passing hour,
until the time itself began to bend towards her softly,
apologetically.
And still... she never blamed the world.
She simply gathered her ache into petals
and watered her longing with a kind of grace that made the wind ache
for not knowing how to carry her.
Her footsteps became pollen her thoughts,
lilac trails her sighs a lullaby of unseen spring.
She did not bloom for them.
She bloomed because nothing else knew how to hold her sorrow
except the garden she became.
… ~