Ink-Stained Petals

The more I stand to lose, the more I hesitate to hold. And isn’t that the cruel contradiction of wanting love?

Scattered pages surround me, thoughts I’ve written and rewritten, marked by ink and fear. And right in the middle—like a drop of blood in snow—rests a single rose. Whole. Beautiful. Alone.

That’s what love often feels like to me.

Not the giddy, movie-scene type. But the love that exists in quiet questions and daydreams—sometimes romantic, sometimes desperate. I’ve spent years nurturing this garden inside me, sowing seeds of platonic love, self-compassion, and healing. And just when I think a new bloom is ready to rise, the wind of doubt shakes everything loose again.

Rejection never visits quietly in my world. It arrives like a storm, tearing through my sense of self. I’ve tried to armor myself with logic, with realism. I told myself I wasn’t scared of being abandoned—I was just cautious. Just smart. But therapy has a way of peeling those layers off. What I thought was charm, turned out to be survival. What I thought was stoicism, turned out to be buried sadness.

It’s embarrassing, really. To admit how much I still hurt. To confess that at times, I imagine perfect lovers just so I don’t have to face the imperfect ones. That maybe I crafted someone in my head—a collage of features, habits, and ideals—to shield myself from disappointment. They live between these pages, written in lines too poetic for the real world. Safe. Unreachable. Mine.

But even as I protect myself, a part of me still hopes.

There’s a teenage girl tucked somewhere in the attic of my soul. She’s gentle, dreamy, and foolishly brave. She wants slow dances in living rooms and love letters folded into jacket pockets. And though I often tell her to hush—to grow up—she persists. She refuses to give up on love. Not just any love, but the kind that chooses her back, over and over.

And sometimes I wonder: if I’m still so full of longing, is it possible that I haven’t given up either?

What scares me more than heartbreak is the thought that I may never even try again. That I may settle into this role of being the one who always gives, always reaches, always initiates. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe this time, I want to be pursued. To be the one whose name is written across someone else’s scattered pages. To be wanted without asking.

Is that too much?

I think not. I think there is courage in saying, this time, I won’t be the first one to bend. Maybe that’s not weakness or stubbornness—but healing. A quiet rebellion against all the times I chased ghosts and called them lovers.

So I sit here now, among the pages, with the rose of my own becoming. I think about how I’ve filled notebooks with versions of love that never arrived, and how maybe… that’s okay. Maybe they were never meant to. Maybe writing them was how I stayed soft in a world that asked me to harden.

I don’t know what love will look like when it finds me next. But I know it won’t be perfect, and I won’t be either. Still, I’ll be ready—not desperate, not broken—but open. Because in all this uncertainty, there is one truth I’ve come to trust:

I am not unlovable. I am just waiting for the kind of love that doesn’t feel like survival.

So let this rose lie here—bold, fragile, whole. Not waiting to be picked, but simply blooming where it was placed. Because love isn’t about being chosen. It’s about being seen.

And I’m ready to be seen.