the language of wilted flowers

[anemoneletters]

To My Love, The One I Loathe So Dearly

Your mother was never the heart of that house.

She was its foundation.

No one admired a foundation. They only expected it to bear weight without complaint.

When she cried in my arms, I realized she did not speak about her house the way people speak about a home. She spoke like someone describing a place where she had survived. Every room belonged to someone else. Every corner carried another person’s voice. She had nowhere she could call her own, not even within the walls she spent her life keeping upright. She cleaned until her hands forgot they belonged to her. She swallowed every grief before it could stain the floor she had just mopped. Even her wish to disappear was whispered, as though she feared taking up too much space in a place that had never once made space for her.

She once stood between you and your father, believing that love could stop a collapsing ceiling with nothing but her own body.

It spared the child.

It could not save the man.

You spent your life looking upward, starving for your father’s approval, convinced that if he finally saw you, something inside you would become whole.

You never noticed that the house was teaching you how to stand.

Brick by brick.

Silence by silence.

Anger by anger.

You inherited more than his face. You inherited the architecture of his love. A love that mistakes fear for respect. A love that enters a room carrying its own weather. A love that leaves everyone else calculating where it is safest to stand.

And I hated how easily I recognized it.

Because I cried the way your mother cried.

I understood you the way she understood the men who hurt her.

I excused your anger the way she excused theirs.

Until I realized I was becoming another wall in the same house.

A wall that learned to absorb every blow without making a sound.

I cannot spend my life waiting for a foundation to stop sinking while everyone living above it insists the house is still standing.

I cannot love a man whose anger asks to be understood before it asks who it has broken.

Your mother did everything she could to keep that house from collapsing.

She lost herself beneath it.

I will not.

Good bye, my loathsome love.

– annika r. y.

[seaphine]

If it is meant for you, it will cross oceans, distances, and doubts to reach you.

[letsbelonelytogetherr]

— josé olivarez // natalie diaz

[anemoneletters]

The Hunt

No rabbit is born fearing wolves.

It follows the larger footprints through the grass because that is what small creatures do. They believe the older ones know where the briars end, where the river shallows, where the forest loosens its grip. Trust became an instinct, not a lesson to be learned.

The wolf knows this, so it does not lunge.

It waits for the rabbit to step close enough that the distance between faith and ruin becomes no wider than a breath.

The meadow does not protest.

The wind continues combing through the grass. Birds embroider the afternoon with indifferent hymns. Even the trees stand like solemn witnesses who have forgotten that witnessing and intervening are not the same thing.

Then the jaws close.

Upon the flesh.

Upon the hushed certainty that the world is arranged in kindness.

The rabbit learns that teeth are patient things. They need not tear to leave a wound. They need only hold long enough for fear to sink beneath the skin, where it hardens like a splinter too deep to draw out.

When the wolf lets go, the forest has already forgiven itself.

The rabbit cannot.

It leaves no blood upon the earth.

It carries it inward.

Years pass, yet the hunt continues with borrowed paws.

Every rustling leaf becomes the promise of another mouth. Every outstretched hand must first survive the trial of hidden fangs. The rabbit no longer runs because it sees wolves.

It runs because it has learned that wolves need not look like wolves.

They may resemble shelter.

They may speak with familiar voices.

They may walk beside you so gently that, by the time instinct finally screams, it is no longer warning you of danger.

It is mourning what trust has already surrendered.

There are hunters who kill only once.

There are others who leave their prey breathing.

The latter are remembered longest.

For the rabbit spends the rest of its life carrying invisible bite marks, returning each dawn to a meadow that has long forgotten the hunt, while its own heart, poor trembling creature, continues to beat as though it is still caught between the wolf’s teeth.

– annika r. y.

[anemoneletters]

Of Forget-Me-Nots and Other Things That Refused to Die

Memory is a curse that I have long ceased praying against.

There are women who kneel before altars, asking God to lighten the burdens He has stitched into the lining of their souls. I have never been one of them. If there is mercy to be found, I suspect it does not lie in forgetting, but in surviving the terrible privilege of remembering.

The Victorians, in all their peculiar reverence for mourning, entrusted the forget-me-not with a simple command: forget me not. They believed the blossom to be faithful enough to outlive death itself, carrying remembrance from the living into the mouths of graves.

How charmingly naïve.

For memory has never waited for flowers.

It has always rooted itself inside flesh.

Mine has grown wild.

Forget-me-nots have crept through every abandoned chamber of my mind, climbing over locked doors and ruined staircases, winding themselves around old injuries until I can no longer distinguish where the roots end and the wounds begin. Their petals have found sanctuary in my ribs, where no gardener may trespass, and they bloom with such unwavering devotion that I have come to believe they are watered not by rain, but by the tears I have mistaken for ordinary living.

There are gardens that exist solely because no one was brave enough to burn them.

I am one.

Within me lies the child who was offered to silence long before she knew the language of grief.

No church bell tolled.

No heavens split apart.

The world, with all its dreadful indifference, continued faithfully. Birds continued to sing. The kettle continued to whistle. People laughed in neighboring rooms while innocence, that delicate white camellia every child deserves to cradle, was quietly trampled beneath careless feet.

How strange it is that the body becomes a mausoleum before it has ever learned to become a home.

Years have passed, yet there are mornings when I awaken with the certainty that somewhere beneath my skin, that child is still knocking.

She does not ask to be avenged.

She asks only not to be forgotten.

So I remain.

I bear witness.

Someone must.

For memory, if abandoned, becomes another betrayal.

The house in which I grew was no less haunted.

Not by spirits.

By the living.

There are ghosts more terrifying than the dead. They breathe. They speak. They set plates upon dinner tables while swallowing whole the tenderness that once made them human. My childhood was measured not by birthdays but by the weather of voices, by the violence hidden inside ordinary conversations, by the dreadful skill of predicting whether tonight would end in silence, in shouting, or in another apology destined to become meaningless before sunrise.

There is a peculiar loneliness reserved for children who become archivists of their own homes.

I catalogued every slammed door.

Every trembling voice.

Every fractured promise.

Every silence so heavy it seemed to press the ceiling lower.

The Victorians draped mirrors after death lest the soul become trapped inside its own reflection.

Had they entered our house, they would have draped every window.

Some sorrows should never have been made to look at themselves.

Then came the days when death no longer lingered politely beyond the threshold.

It learned our address.

It sat beside my mother.

There is no graceful language for watching someone you love grow weary of remaining alive. No flower was ever assigned such a burden. No ribbon, no mourning veil, no arrangement of lilies could soften the terror of wondering whether each goodbye had unknowingly become the last.

People speak of courage as though it is forged upon battlefields.

Mine was forged in hallways.

Outside closed doors.

In listening for footsteps.

In convincing myself that tomorrow still existed.

There are daughters who inherit jewelry.

Others inherit the impossible duty of keeping another human being tethered to the earth.

I carried that duty with hands still trembling from wounds no one had noticed.

It was far too heavy.

It remains so.

And then there was love.

Or perhaps the aching imitation of it.

I loved with the desperation of someone who believed affection could redeem history. I mistook endurance for intimacy. I believed that if I gave enough, forgave enough, waited long enough, some benevolent season would finally arrive carrying all the tenderness we had misplaced.

Instead, loneliness flowered where conversation should have grown.

There are hungers that resemble starvation despite the table being full.

One may be touched every day and still remain unseen.

One may be told they are loved while quietly disappearing beneath the weight of being misunderstood.

This is not an absolution.

Only a confession.

Loneliness does not excuse the roads upon which grief persuades us to wander.

I reached for warmth where I ought not have reached.

I accepted comfort where boundaries should have stood.

The fault is mine.

So too is the sorrow.

There are injuries we survive.

There are injuries we become.

I have known both.

If memory is a courtroom, then I have spent years standing as witness, defendant, and grieving mother to every version of myself.

The child.

The daughter.

The lover.

The betrayer.

The abandoned.

The one who remained after everyone else had left.

They all bear my face.

How impossible it is to acquit any one of them without condemning another.

People believe grief arrives like a storm.

They are mistaken.

Grief is horticultural.

It is patient.

It buries itself in winter.

It drinks quietly from hidden rivers.

It waits years before unfurling its first leaf beneath an unsuspecting spring.

One morning you discover that your entire life has become a cemetery disguised as a garden.

Every blossom bears the name of something that died.

Trust.

Childhood.

Home.

The illusion that love alone is enough.

Even hope.

Yet among these mournful blooms, the forget-me-not persists with infuriating gentleness.

Its petals are impossibly blue.

Almost heavenly.

As though heaven itself had apologized too late.

I have often wondered whether forgetting would make me lighter.

Whether abandoning these memories would finally allow my bones to become ordinary.

But then who would remember the little girl?

Who would remember the frightened daughter standing outside another closed door?

Who would remember the woman who loved imperfectly because she had never once been taught what safety felt like?

The dead depend upon remembrance.

So do the living versions of ourselves we were forced to bury before their time.

No.

I shall keep my curse.

Let memory bloom until every chamber of my ruined heart has become overgrown with forget-me-nots.

Let ivy cover every gravestone.

Let the roses blacken.

Let the lilies bow their heads beneath the weight of mourning.

I shall walk those gardens barefoot until my feet know every stone by name.

For if memory is the price demanded by love, by survival, by witness, then I shall pay it willingly.

And when, at last, time gentles its relentless hand, when the flowers have exhausted their season and their seeds have quietly surrendered themselves to the earth, memory will no longer be a chain fastened to my ankle.

It will become soil.

Dark.

Sacred.

Patient.

The sort from which all things worthy of resurrection are born.

For once memory fades, it is not because it has died.

It is because it has finally finished becoming a flower.

– annika r. y.