Dead Flowers

Dead Flowers

They sit on the table,

stems bowed like prayers

that were never answered.

The petals curl inward,

holding their last breath,

fragile and stubborn

against forgetting.

I should throw them away.

But I don’t.

I let them stay—

a monument

to what once was alive

and too beautiful to last.

You’d laugh if you saw them now,

these ghosts in a vase,

color drained,

smelling faintly of endings.

I keep them

like I kept your words—

even when they started to rot.

There’s a strange kind of comfort

in decay.

It reminds me that love

was here once,

that something bloomed,

even if it died

quietly.

And maybe that’s enough—

to know it lived,

to know it mattered,

to sit with the proof

in a vase of dead flowers.