Petal Riser

You take me the way the sun finds a flower that never learned its morning

Not with warmth, but with a patience that does not leave

I had grown used to the dark

The kind that settles into the root

Until even the idea of opening feels like a mistake

The garden did not question me

It let me remain folded into myself

Petal against petal, a small life no one could enter

And no one could ruin

It worked

Nothing reached me

Nothing stayed

I waited for the taking

I knew how it went—how anything that sees you open does not stop

So I held myself tighter

Closed even against the light

As if survival meant never being seen soft again

And still

Something in me began to give

Not bloom, never bloom

Just a slight failure in my keeping

A single petal loosening as if it had grown tired of protecting what no one had come for

I felt it like grief

Sharp, quiet, uninvited

The body remembering something it had buried to keep living

You saw it

And you did nothing

You did not reach

You did not take

You did not ask for more

You stayed as if that one small opening was already too much to ask of me

And that

That is what broke me

Because I had been taught that anything that stays will hurt you eventually

That love is only a slower kind of loss

But you

You stayed exactly where I left you

As if I did not have to give you anything else

And so

I opened a little more

Not for you

Not even for the light

But because, for the first time

I felt something I did not recognize

The absence of harm

And it was unbearable

Because it meant

I had been closed all this time for something that was not here

And now

I do not know how far I can open

I do not know if the dark will return

But something in me

Something small, tired, still alive

Keeps loosening despite it

Because you did not take me when you could have

Because you did not break me when I was already open enough to be broken

Because you stayed long enough for me to feel what it is to be held in the light

And not disappear