Fulcrum of a Rose

(The rose you dropped ) Roses are beautiful, ain’t they? You see them once, and for a moment you believe in softness again. In something that won’t leave. But beauty tricks you— it draws your hands close before you notice the blood. No one tells you how much it hurts to love something that was born to wilt. He smiled like safety. Spoke like a promise. And I believed, like I always do— with my whole damn body. I reached out, let him in, let him touch every place I swore I’d locked up. I opened the door, and he came in like sunlight— but burned everything on his way out. Tell me— how do you forget hands that once knew how to hold you like you were holy? How do you forget a face you bled for? I screamed into pillows, bit down on the night so it wouldn’t hear me break. Every silence was a scream I didn’t say out loud. He was the rose— breathtaking, deadly. And I was the fool who thought I could hold him without losing skin. I still carry him. Not in my heart— he hollowed that out. But in my marrow. In the way I flinch when kindness feels too easy. Pain doesn’t fade. It hides. Waits in the cracks of my ribs and the backs of my eyes. Waits for the quiet to speak again. Maybe the fulcrum ain’t in the bloom. Maybe it’s in the wreckage after. In the blood you try to wash off, in the tears that fall when no one’s watching, in the silence you swallow because screaming never brought him back. And maybe that’s me. A rose too— not the kind you frame in glass, but the kind you dropped and never picked up again.