She is the last flower.

I flinch. As if something sharp is being thrown at me. Every time you say my name like that. Every time an order comes my way. I flinch and hope to disappear. Or that at least the tears that are welling up will sink deep down, where all the other pain she causes goes to rest.


But I don’t ever disappear. And I don’t ever get it right. So the shouting continues and the tears never sink deep enough. And every time I watch myself react like this I flash back to the days when the darkness overcame everything else. And I pray that I’ll escape it. I pray for a moment of peace, a moment when my thoughts aren’t loud screams for help.


You think I’m being dramatic, that I need to get perspective. Well maybe if you had some perspective on the way everything filters through my thoughts, through these experiences, maybe then you could get back to me. Please stop trying to make me feel guilty every time I tell you how I really feel.


You make me feel like I don’t deserve to hurt. Like, I’ll never really be hurt enough to deserve your attention, or the help I so desperately need. And you have no idea the lengths I’ve gone to prove you wrong. You make me feel silly. You look at me like I watch too much tv and live in another world where people are allowed to be melodramatic and say things like “I feel so sad my body hurts, please let me sleep today away.”


I need to feel safe. To feel loved. You always asked me, and I never really thought about it, for fear of hurting your feelings. -Typical of me, to protect your feelings before even beginning to consider the effect on mine. Now that I think about it, if that was all the love you had to give, maybe I didn’t deserve it. I took it all, and this is what you get back: A broken girl who leans on you only when she can’t bear to let someone else down, someone who hasn’t given even half of their heart. I hope that you have at least golden moment trapped in your memory, where all this felt worth it.


All I need is to know that you would help me heal, without resentment, without carrying my pain as a burden you never really deserved. I need to be certain that you wouldn’t flaunt my secrets. But that you wouldn’t hide them as some dark unspoken part of me that you are ashamed of either. I need you to know when my smile is real, and when the laugh is one I can’t control.


But every part of me, every piece of me that became like this while I watched the pieces of you fall into place, believes that the world I so desperately need, the only world that would be able to save me, doesn’t exist within the realms of our potential. I say this not because I lack faith, but because I lack the energy to believe anything other than what I have seen. And maybe you would call this defeatist. But maybe I’d say you never tried hard enough when I cried for help, however soft and infrequent those cries were. You should’ve known better, you should’ve asked for more.