I carry all of this within me, and still I do not know how to give it a voice. It presses against my ribs, asking to be born, but I was never taught the shape of its name.

There is a garden in my soul: a place of countless blooms and murmuring decay, now uninhabited, abandoned by the world. Still, every day, I kneel in silence and water its flowers. That is where my peace learned to breathe.

So much life, and no way to let it bloom beyond me. The door remains sealed, though the key may rest closer than I dare to believe.

These words I speak, these words I think: they are not explanations. They are remains, fragments of a body I cannot carry whole. I leave them behind like blood, proof that I was here.

One day, the last flower in me will fall without ever being seen. I will not be there to witness its ending, and I will no longer water it. But my words will wander: they will be ignored, they will be held too tightly, they will break someone open.

I will never know. It will be too late for me, yet the flowers will live again.

And when the roots return to the dark, when they remember the language of soil and decay, something will rise again. Maybe not me, but something that knows my name.

I, too, will bloom once more.

And if blooming demands my undoing, then let me be undone gently, petal by petal. Let the remnants of me soften into the ground, let them sink into the ancient hunger of the earth. What I cannot voice will become nourishment; what I cannot name will become soil.

And though no one may know its origin, the flowers will know. They will carry my longing in their stems, my silence in their scent, my name in the trembling of their petals.

And that will be enough.