The Scars That Bloomed When She Left

The burn scars cracked open on a Tuesday.

Ellie had been gone for 47 days.

I remember peeling off my sweat-soaked shirt after another night of phantom pains—the kind that made my nerves scream like they were still bathed in kitchen flames. That’s when I saw them: thin fissures splitting the mottled skin of my chest, glowing like bioluminescent river deltas. And from those cracks, petals. Crimson roses unfurling slowly, drunkenly, as if waking from a long sleep.

I touched one. It felt like velvet and shame.

I. The Wound Garden

The doctors called it "psychosomatic keratinization." Bullshit.

Ellie’s note was still crumpled in my pocket:

"I can’t love a ghost, Ash. You died in that fire. Only your bones stayed."

Now, roses grew where my skin graft ended. Their roots tunneled under my ribs, drinking from a well of abandonment. I hid them—bandages, baggy sweaters, lies about rashes. But flowers demand light.

At the grocery store, an old woman watched a rose creep past my collar. "Someone watered you with tears," she whispered. I dropped my basket and ran, thorns tearing holes in my lies.

That night, I dreamt of Ellie planting tulips in our backyard. "Things grow where they’re wanted, Ash," she’d said. I woke choking on cherry blossoms.

II. The Leaving

I started leaving trails.

Petals where she’d remember:

Her favorite bookstore: Pressed peonies in a copy of Neruda.

The bridge where we kissed: Vines snaking over rusted railings.

The bus stop where she vanished: A garden of thorns and lilacs.

I was pruning a rose from my sternum when I saw her.

Twilight. Rain misting the city into a grayscale painting. She stood across the street—hair like spilled ink, coat flapping like a wounded crow’s wing. "Ellie!" I screamed.

She didn’t turn. Just stepped into the fog.

At my feet, a new note:

"Your flowers are beautiful.

You always knew how to grow things

but never how to keep them.

—E"

Wisteria erupted from my spine.

III. The Compost

Winter came. My apartment became a cathedral of decay and rebirth.

Vines cracked the drywall. Lilacs shouldered through floorboards. The super pounded on my door: "It smells like a graveyard in spring!"

I stopped hiding.

Let roses crown my scars. Let strangers stare. Some recoiled—"Freak." Others smiled—"A walking miracle." A girl with Ellie’s storm-gray eyes handed me a seed packet: "For the hollow places," she said.

On the anniversary of the fire, I went back. Our charred building stood like a skeleton. Snow kissed the rubble. Kneeling, I planted her seeds in the ashen soil.

"I forgive you," I told the wind. "For leaving me empty enough to be filled with gardens."

Thorns softened. Petals snowed onto scorched earth.

IV. The Harvest

Spring rewrote me.

Where scars knotted my skin, dahlias trumpeted. Where skin wept, honeysuckle hummed. I opened a florist shop called Scar Soil in a bankrupt laundromat.

People came—not for bouquets, but confessions:

"My husband left… now snapdragons grow in my throat."

"Chemo took my breast… orchids bloom in the dent."

"Will it hurt?" they’d whisper.

"Yes," I’d say, handing them seeds from my own chest. "Plant where it aches. Water it with your truth."

Ellie never returned.

But every Monday, I’d find fresh cherry blossoms at the shop door—dewed, fragrant, arranged in the shape of a heart.

V. The Pruning

Today, a woman limped in. Her left leg was a thicket of roses. "They grew after the amputation," she said. "My wife left when she saw them."

I gave her a jar of my thorns. "Grind these. Sprinkle where she walked."

She hesitated. "Will it kill the flowers?"

"No," I smiled, petals drifting from my sleeves. "It just reminds them who they belong to."

Outside, rain fell soft as old regrets. I pressed a hand to my chest—where Ellie’s absence once festered. New buds swelled under my palm: peonies, blood-red and hungry.

Some abandonments aren’t endings. They’re the first crack of light where your soul finally breathes.