The bee does not arrive religiously with a public audience. She comes unannounced, a soft thrum stitched into the afternoon, its body already dusted with the evidence of labor. She enters the flower as if entering a small chapel, bowing its head into the bell of color, brushing against the pollen the way one brushes past strangers on a crowded street. Nothing about this exchange looks like sweetness yet. She is work first: the gathering, the careful packing of gold into the baskets of her legs, the patience of visiting one bloom and then another, repeating the same small devotion until the air itself seems worn thin.

Inside the hive, the miracle continues offstage. Pollen becomes honey through a choreography no one sees: enzymes breaking what was raw into what is sustaining, wings fanning until excess water is breathed away, time doing what time always does best—transforming effort into something that lasts. The honey thickens, darkens, remembers every field the bee crossed. Clover, orange blossom, wildflower growing where no one thought to look. The bee does not taste success. It does not pause to admire the amber glow caught in the comb. It moves on, because there is always more to collect.

The sweetness later appears on a table. A spoon dips and lifts, viscous and shining. Someone smiles, their sweet tooth soothed, their hunger quieted by the promise that the world can still offer pleasure. Sugar settles on the tongue like a reward. In the kitchen, a dessert emerges—layers precise, presentation impeccable. It is praised, photographed, shared. She watches as admiration fills the room, as hearts soften and lean toward her craft. Love was won by the elegance of the end, not the long path that had made it possible.

No one thinks of the bee. No one imagines wings fraying at the edges, her body slowly giving itself over to the work. Gratitude stops at the plate. The sweetness is credited to skill, to luck, to talent, to love—never to the small, tireless labor that made joy possible. The bee returns to the field anyway, carrying on as it always has, turning what is overlooked into something golden, perhaps believing that the honey itself is thanks enough.

The sting arrives like punctuation—sharp, decisive, impossible to ignore. For a moment, pain eclipses everything, a bright flare under the skin, and then the bee is gone, leaving behind the smallest wound and the largest understanding. I press my finger to the place where she chose me, where her life ended so mine could remember sweetness. The ache lingers, warm and insistent, a reminder that honey is never free. I am not mad at her. I thank her quietly, carrying the welt like a keepsake, a brief, living mark of her labor and her gift.

I lay in the hospital bed for weeks because I was not strong enough to carry myself, because my body had become something that required witnesses. The bed knew the shape of me better than I did. It hummed and adjusted and lifted my knees without asking. When I slept, people watched the rise and fall of my chest the way you watch weather from a window, afraid the pattern might change without warning. They were afraid of my sleep, as if rest itself could tip me into danger, as if closing my eyes was a rehearsal for something irreversible.

People watched me sleep with an attention that felt heavier than wakefulness. Sleep made them nervous. Sleep meant silence, and silence meant they leaned closer to monitors, searching for proof that my heart was still deciding to work. Each breath became a small performance. Each exhale reassured them. I learned that rest could frighten others more than pain ever did. Nourishment came only in liquid form, thin and measured, sliding down my throat without resistance. Cups, tubes, ounces. I learned the taste of being alive when it had been stripped of pleasure. Everything counted. Everything watched. The body became a shared project. Even my hunger felt supervised.

On the television there was only a single channel, and it played a show about fish. I did not choose it; it was default. The screen flickered blue and silver, an aquarium I could not enter. I watched scales catch the light like small, perfect shields, each one fitted precisely to the body it protected. There was no excess, no waste. The fish did not question their design. They moved as if they trusted the water to be difficult. Schools moving in dense coordination. Bodies cutting water without hesitation. Scales catching light in precise, overlapping geometry. Each scale appeared perfectly placed, not decorative but necessary, armor that moved. Watching them, I thought about how protection does not slow them down. It enables them.

The herring fascinated me most. How they gathered themselves into a living geometry, how no single fish was responsible for the shape yet every fish was essential to it. Their scales overlapped like quiet agreements, like promises made without language. Each one reflected light away from danger, confusing predators, scattering threat into harmless brilliance. Resilience, I learned, does not always look like standing alone. Sometimes it looks like knowing where to place yourself among others.

I watched the herring weather the waters, their bodies bending but not breaking, their movement a kind of collective breath. They did not panic at the pressure of the current. They read it. They answered to it. I wondered what it would feel like to trust my body that way again, to believe it could adapt instead of collapse. I wondered if strength could be learned by observation, if watching survival was a form of practice.

In the bed, my body felt singular and exposed. Every weakness was mine alone. There was no school to absorb the shock. No shared motion to borrow. My heart worked in isolation. My muscles waited for instructions they could not follow. I envied the fish not for their speed, but for their coordination. Their ability to persist without self-consciousness. I wished I could move the way they did, trusting motion instead of fearing it. I wished my body could remember how to be part of something larger than its own fragility. The herring endured because they were many, because their strength was collective and adaptive. Lying there, monitored and still, I held onto that image: scales flashing, bodies aligned, surviving water that never stops moving.

I dig into the dirt as if it is a language I once spoke fluently and then forgot, my hands remembering before my mind does. The soil is cool and dark, smelling like rain that hasn’t happened yet. I turn it over with my fingers instead of a shovel because I want to feel the ground respond to me, to know where it resists and where it opens. This garden is meant for wildflowers, the kind that do not ask permission to exist. They bloom because they must.

I imagine the seeds as people I have known, or perhaps as the ways people have loved me. The coneflower is steady affection, upright and patient, offering its color without bending too much. It reminds me of someone who loved by staying, by being present even when nothing dramatic was happening. The black-eyed Susan is brighter, almost insistent, a laughter-first kind of love that fills a room and refuses to apologize for its joy. I plant it shallow, knowing it wants to be seen. The poppy is more fragile, its affection brief but intense, a touch that feels like a confession whispered too late. I handle those seeds carefully, as if they might bruise under the weight of my expectations.

As I dig deeper, my fingers begin to strike rock. At first it is occasional, a dull knock that I work around, but soon there are too many. Stones wedge themselves under my nails, press sharply into my knuckles. I try to pry them loose, but they resist, and my frustration rises hot and fast. I wanted soft ground. I wanted ease. But the rocks scrape my skin open in small, unremarkable ways. Thin cuts appear across my hands, and dirt immediately fills them, darkening the red into something brown and indistinct. It stings, not enough to stop me, just enough to remind me that this is work, that wanting something to grow does not mean the ground will cooperate.

I pause, hands trembling slightly, and feel the grit embedded in my palms. I think about how affection can hurt like this too—how loving someone often means pressing against what refuses to move, accepting the small injuries that come from trying anyway. The soil does not apologize. It only exists as it is. I wipe my hands on my jeans and keep digging, slower now, more deliberate, acknowledging each rock before deciding whether to remove it or leave it be. I return to the flowers. The lupine, tall and reaching, is an ambitious love, the kind that believes in future versions of you. It wants depth, so I dig carefully around the stones instead of forcing them out. The daisy is simple affection, uncomplicated and honest, content with less space, content with being exactly what it is. I scatter its seeds freely, trusting them to find their place. The milkweed, essential and often overlooked, reminds me of quiet devotion—the love that supports others without being noticed, the kind that sustains entire ecosystems of feeling.

As the garden takes shape, I begin to understand the rocks differently. They are not obstacles alone. They break up the soil so roots do not drown. They create pockets of air, channels for water, pathways that guide growth upward instead of letting it sprawl and rot. The stones that cut my hands will anchor the roots when the wind comes. They will force the flowers to grow around them, to stretch toward the light with intention.

I press the soil back down, feeling its weight, its truth. My hands ache, marked and dirty. I realize that affection is not about removing every hard thing. It is about learning which resistances matter, which pains are instructive, which rocks are there not to stop growth but to shape it. When I stand and look at the bare earth, I can already see the future colors leaning upward, generous and unafraid, growing liberally because the ground asked them to try harder.

I want to take care of a canvas that already knows another hand. I tell myself this is restoration, not destruction, that the careful stripping away of pigment is an act of love. I soften the surface with patience and solvents. The paint loosens like old scabs, like memories that no longer bleed but still ache when touched. I work slowly, afraid of tearing what holds everything together, afraid of finding nothing underneath at all.

Colors resist me. They bloom back as soon as I think I’ve lifted them. Ochres clinging like rust, blues sinking into the weave, reds insisting on being seen. I get lost inside them, the way one gets lost inside a story that promises meaning if you just read one more page. Each layer feels like a life I’ve lived or borrowed: the bright, impulsive strokes of wanting; the darker, heavier glazes of staying too long; the accidental smears that happened when my hands were shaking.

Sometimes I stop and step back, certain I’ve ruined it. The painting looks wounded, half-remembered, unsure of what it wants to be. But when I lean in again, I can almost see it—the pale grid beneath the chaos, the quiet geometry holding everything in place. The canvas is not blank. It has absorbed every color that has ever touched it. It remembers even when the paint pretends it doesn’t. This is where I always end up: wanting to go further, wanting to reach that raw surface where nothing is pretending to be more than it is. I want to know what remains when I remove the gestures, the performances, the beautiful lies I told myself so I wouldn’t feel alone. I want to touch the place where the painting first said yes to being painted.

But I never quite get there. There is always another layer, another hue that convinces me it is the last. I tell myself one more careful pass, one more moment of attention, and I will finally see clearly. Instead, I find myself surrounded by color again, stained by it, carrying it on my hands.

Always trying to reach the canvas beneath a person, beneath a memory. Always searching for the place where love was simplest, before it became complicated by absence. I keep stripping the days down, hoping to find them intact underneath. I don’t know how long I can continue this careful erasure, this devotion to what remains, but I keep searching because stopping would mean accepting there is no canvas left to touch.

I am trying to make a candle that smells like the street after it rains. Not the rain itself, not the clean idea of water falling, but the moment afterward, when the heat rises back up from the ground and the asphalt exhales. It is a dark, mineral breath, almost sweet, almost bitter, and it presses its face into your memory without asking permission. I remember it from childhood, though I can’t remember the year, the street name, or even whose house I was walking toward. I only remember standing still while the adults kept moving, the way children do when something invisible suddenly becomes important. That smell felt like proof that the world was alive and speaking, even if I didn’t yet know how to answer it.

Now I melt wax, and I drip oils in one by one, counting, uncapping, leaning in too close, trying to capture that scent-from-childhood-I-am-still-failing-to-name. I search for the scent like it is a word that slipped my mouth and fell somewhere behind the couch. I know it exists. I know it has a name. But every time I reach for it, my hand closes around something adjacent—smoke, dirt, stone, warmth, iron, rain—but never the thing itself. I stir and stir, hoping repetition will summon accuracy. Instead, the mixture smells like approximation, like circling something without entering it.

This is how language often treats me. I am full of meaning, and yet I arrive with pockets turned inside out. I feel deeply, sometimes overwhelmingly, but when I open my mouth, what comes out is thinner than what I meant. I forget the right word at the worst possible moment, mid-sentence, mid-confession, mid-love. There is a pause, and in that silence I watch the other person’s face adjust. I see patience flicker, then confusion, then a small disappointment I imagine but cannot disprove. I apologize, again. I always apologize. I say, Sorry, that’s not the word I want, or give me a second, or never mind. Nevermind is the worst one. Nevermind is surrender.

The candle does not care that I don’t know the word. Wax does not demand precision. It only asks for heat and time. Still, I feel as though I am failing it, the way I fail people when I cannot articulate the exact shade of my longing or the geometry of my grief. I want to say: this is how much I care, this is how afraid I am of losing you, this is how beautiful this moment feels inside me. Instead, I gesture vaguely. I offer synonyms like loose change. I hope the weight adds up to something convincing.

There is shame in not knowing the right words, especially when words are supposed to be my tools, my shelter, or my offering. I was taught that naming something gives you power over it, that clarity is a kind of virtue. So when my tongue trips, I feel as though I am betraying not only myself but the people waiting on the other side of my sentence. I worry they think I am careless or withholding. I worry they do not see that inside me the feeling is complete, complex, and alive—only untranslated.

As the wax cools, a skin forms on the surface, delicate and opaque. I think about how memory works the same way. The smell of wet asphalt is sealed somewhere beneath years of other smells—coffee, hospitals, old books, sex, soap—but it survives. It is patient. It waits for rain, for heat, for the right conditions to rise again. Maybe words are like that too. Maybe they retreat not because they are gone, but because they are waiting to be met gently, without panic. I place the wick carefully in the center. I want it straight. I want it steady. The wick feels like a promise: something small meant to carry fire without disappearing all at once. I think about all the conversations where I burned too hot, too fast, trying to explain myself, exhausting the moment. I think about all the times I went quiet, afraid of getting it wrong. This candle is my apology. For the pauses. For the fragments. For the feelings I handed over without proper labels. For every time I meant more than I managed to say.

When I finally light it, the flame wavers, then settles. The scent is not exact, but it is close enough to make my chest ache. It reminds me that approximation can still be honest, that longing does not require perfect language to be real. I sit with it and watch the light pool softly around the room. I tell myself this is how I love too, hoping the warmth reaches you anyway. I hope the wick never burns out.

I loved running as a way to work out. I loved how it gave me an ideal body—not a billboard body, not Brad Pitt in Fight Club, not carved for the gaze—but a body that felt earned, explained, and defensible. Running made me feel confident in how I looked naked, in the quiet honesty of a mirror that did not ask questions so much as confirm effort. It gave me a vocabulary for health: heart rate, breath, sweat, distance. It gave me proof I could point to and say, See? I am disciplined. I am attractive. I am strong. Running let me believe my body was not an accident but a project, one I showed up for each morning, lacing my shoes like an oath small enough to keep.

At first, that seemed like enough. Confidence, I thought, was cumulative. You gather it mile by mile, muscle by muscle, until it spills over into other parts of your life. I believed if I could run far enough, long enough, with enough consistency, love would recognize me. That confidence would become visible, like steam rising off my skin. I thought I was training not just my legs but my future: a stronger heart, a steadier gaze, a body that knew how to stay when things burned. I thought love would see the miles and understand the work. And about love, both require devotion without guarantee. Both ask you to show up on days when motivation is gone and all that remains is habit. You learn to listen closely to your body, to its aches and warnings, the way you learn to read the small shifts in someone else’s voice. You pace yourself. You learn that going too fast at the beginning can cost you everything later, that endurance is not about speed but about patience, about knowing when to push and when to ease back. Running teaches you how to breathe through discomfort, how to stay present when every instinct says stop. Loving asks the same.

The work looks similar, too. The repetition. The quiet, unglamorous hours no one applauds. The way progress is almost invisible day to day, yet undeniable over time. You invest in shoes, in time, in recovery, the same way you invest in words, in touch, in learning how to repair what you’ve strained. You accept that soreness is not failure but evidence of effort. That tenderness means something has been used. Running taught me that love, like distance, is not conquered but negotiated daily. But somewhere along the route, something shifted. I am too tired now. Too thin. Too slow. My body feels less like a project and more like a question I don’t know how to answer. The mirror has stopped confirming anything; it only reflects persistence without clarity. I no longer know if I am devotedly running toward something or apologetically running away from it. The miles blur together. The reason I lace my shoes feels harder to name. I still run, but I don’t always know why. There are days when running feels like proof I cannot stop, even when stopping might be kindness. Days when I wonder if I learned endurance at the cost of rest, discipline at the cost of listening. Loving was supposed to arrive as a reward, a finish line I could cross with my hands on my knees, breathless and smiling. Instead, love became another long stretch of road, another place where effort did not guarantee arrival. I trained my body to keep going, but I never trained my heart to ask where it was headed.

Still, I run. I run through doubt the way I once ran through confidence. I run through mornings that feel hollow and evenings that feel unfinished. I run because my body remembers even when my mind hesitates. Because movement has become a language I speak fluently, even when I have nothing to say. Some have suggested, Maybe you are not running toward love anymore. Maybe you are not running away from it either. Maybe I am just running, suspended in the act, slowly learning that devotion without direction can exhaust you, but stopping without understanding can undo you.

So I keep my pace. I listen. I let the road be what it is. I let my body be tired without calling it weak. I let myself be unsure without quitting. The season in which you keep going not because you are certain, but because you are still here, still breathing, still willing to place one foot in front of the other and trust that meaning might meet you somewhere along the way—that is how I commit.

I keep a flower pressed between my warm pages, its petals thinned to translucence, its color softened to a whisper, and I tell myself it will live as long as my love—forever, if forever can be held still. Once dried, it forgets the urgency of blooming and instead leans into the quiet endurance of memory. It becomes a small artifact of devotion, a fragile monument that refuses decay, as if time itself hesitates before touching something so meticulously cherished. And in this preserved blossom, I see us: a love that has shed its moisture and shock, settling into a form that can outlast storms, calendars, and bad dates, surviving not through freshness but through the patience of preservation.

It becomes like an old oil painting, varnish cracked into soft golden rivers, pigment deepened by years of being looked at. The artist may step back, declare it complete, but anyone who has ever cared for such a painting knows that completion is only the beginning of its lifelong care. Dust gathers like the smallest drama; light fades like an unspoken fear; the canvas tightens and loosens as the seasons shift. So I watch over it. I keep the frame steady. I bring my whole breath to its surface and promise it protection even when the original hand is long gone. For what is love if not a restoration practiced daily, a willingness to polish what most would overlook, a vow to defend beauty even after beauty thinks it’s finished speaking?

A love like dried flowers holds the pacific truth: that anything worth loving asks to be tended beyond its moment of creation, and that care, offered again and again, is what makes a thing eternal.

Light travels like a slow confession, crossing distances so vast they might as well be measured in regrets instead of miles, and when I look up tonight the star I’m reaching for is already gone, extinguished long before its beauty ever reached my eyes. I stand beneath the dark bowl of sky and realize I am witnessing something ancient, something that lived its whole life without knowing I would one day search for it, desperate for its brilliance to tell me something about my own. And it breaks me—how gorgeous it is, and how gorgeously late I am. I think of all the moments in my life when I should have shown up sooner, when the people I loved were burning themselves out while I was still on my way, too far, too unsure, too slow with my tenderness. The star becomes a mirror, a soft and distant reprimand: here is what you missed, here is what you could not save, here is the light that had already faded by the time you thought to look. Yet the light still arrives, unbothered by its own lateness, gliding through the dark with the patience of something that no longer expects to be seen but offers itself anyway. And maybe that is what undoes me most—the quiet generosity of it, the way it still chooses to shine for me long after its fire has gone cold. I catch it against the black, this ghost-light, and I want to tell it I’m sorry, that I wish I had been there when it mattered, that I’m learning how to arrive before things collapse under their own silence. But the star says nothing. It only keeps traveling, keeps unfolding the story of a life I never touched, and I stand here with breaking open, finally learning what it means to see something in time, even if time has already passed it by.

I catch the firefly gently, as if holding a breath between my hands, and place it in the jar only long enough to know its glow is real, its small trembling light a kind of heartbeat borrowed from the dusk. When I lift the lid, it rises without hesitation, drifting into the warm air like a fragment of a dream shrugging itself awake. It circles me in slow, uncertain arcs, a tiny lantern testing the edges of my presence, and I stand still so I don’t disturb whatever fragile miracle is unfolding. Each flicker feels like a question the world is asking: can you see this, can you let it be what it is without trying to keep it? The firefly pulses once, twice, and I feel myself illuminated from the inside out, as if its glow has brushed something tender in me that I didn’t know was waiting to be touched. It moves around me with a kind of shy confidence, a choreography meant only for the night and whoever is quiet enough to witness it. And I am in awe—unguarded awe—because something so small can choose to hover near me, shining as though the darkness were simply another way of being seen.

It happens quietly, the way a flower decides to bloom in front of me, as if the air between us softens enough for it to dare opening. I watch the petals loosen their grip on secrecy, unfolding subtle tremors of color, and I feel chosen—not in the possessive way, but in the gentle way one is trusted with something still trembling from its own becoming. When a flower blooms like that, right before my eyes, it is as if it determines I am safe enough to witness its potential, as if I have earned the privilege of standing in the room where its beauty rehearses itself into certainty. I imagine its roots whispering through the soil, telling it that the light is kind today, that the world on the surface has made space for its tenderness. So it rises, slowly, deliberately, offering me the soft geometry of what was once hidden. And I cannot help but feel that this is intimacy: a living thing revealing its colors without fear of being mishandled.

To see something open like that—to watch a life of quiet ambition unfurl toward the sun—reminds me of how rare it is to be present for someone else’s becoming. There is a shimmer of lust in it, too. The grasping, the yearning that accompanies beauty freely given, unforced, unapologetic. The bloom feels like an invitation to understand that growth is not a performance but an act of trust, that the world is full of delicate bodies waiting for a gentle witness. Petals split themselves from the tight fist of a bud, I feel the honor of being allowed close enough to see what was always possible, what was always inside, waiting to open in the right light.

Steam loosens its grip on the room as I step from the shower, droplets clinging to me like tiny questions I’m not ready to answer. The mirror is still blurred, a soft haze that delays the truth. I lift my hand and wipe a swath through the fog, and there I am—clearer than I want to be, thinner than I remember, a little scared of the person returning my stare. The two days of growth I shaved away and left a pink, tender surface across my face: a landscape freshly exposed, maybe hopeful. I run my fingertips along the bare skin and feel the tremor beneath, the quick pulse of being seen. And in the sink, I read the shavings like tea leaves.

For a moment I stand—naked, open, undecorated by excuses or disguises. My body looks both familiar and strange, as if I’ve just arrived inside it after a long trip. Collarbone sharper, ribcage more pronounced, shadows pooling where once there was softness. I inhale, trying to fill myself, but the breath wavers, snagging on something I cannot name. I tell myself it’s only the cold air, but something deeper is there moving, something old and restless.

The light hums above me, and yet I don’t look away. Maybe I am waiting to recognize myself again, to meet the version of me that survived the week, the month, the years of shrinking. Maybe I am waiting for reassurance, or absolution, or just a sign that this reflection is still allowed to change. Water runs down my sternum, slow as a thought, and I watch it fall, disappearing at the edge of my reflection. I whisper nothing to the glass, but the silence feels like an answer. I stand there, learning again how to look at myself without flinching.

I dress a little nicer than the morning asks, smoothing my sweater as if someone might notice. At the coffee place I take my usual seat, pretending I’m just here for caffeine, not company. I sip slowly, hoping to look like the kind of person who starts a conversation, or at least invites one. Around me people rehearse their day, checking watches, scanning headlines, already elsewhere. But I prepared for this—this small hope of sharing warmth with someone I knew, steam rising between us like a gentle introduction. The place hums with people tuning themselves for the day, but I’ve prepared for something softer: the hope of not drinking this cup alone. I sit straighter, imagining I’m the kind who begins conversations and leans toward her with warmth. I want to look my best for the chance of a shared moment. Once more, our moment. I sit alone, ready, waiting, practicing belonging with every quiet sip.