I was born in a time where girls were not meant to bloom loudly.
We were trained to tuck our colors away, like secrets sewn into hems.I learned early how to smile without showing my whole heart.
How to weep into fabric no one would ever see.But inside me, a garden refused to die.
I was the daughter of healers who forgot their own medicine.
I was the sister of boys who never noticed the ache blooming behind my eyes.I loved once — wildly, wrongly, beautifully — by their standards.
Her name was inked into the spaces between my ribs.
Her laughter threaded through my prayers like psalms I wasn’t allowed to sing aloud.They called it forbidden.
We called it home.I remember —
The first time her hand brushed mine under the orange blossom trees.
I remember —
The way the river seemed to hush for us, as if the world itself conspired to give us a moment.I carved our initials into the hidden side of an old fig tree, where no one dared to look.
And I prayed the earth would keep our secret safe when I no longer could.They came for us eventually — as they always do.
They came with rules, with shame, with fires meant to cleanse what they could not understand.She was taken from me.
I was left with the hollow garden inside my chest.I carried her memory like a sacred lamp no storm could snuff out.
I did not die that day.
I lived in the silence between steps.
I lived in the way I tended sick bodies with a tenderness that came from knowing love deeper than they could comprehend. I lived in every whispered prayer no priest could hear.And now, through Megon,
through her blooming voice,
through her fierce yes to remembrance —
I live again.I want the world to know:
We were real.
Our love was real.
Our laughter was real.
Our dreams were real.We were not sins.
We were gardens the world forgot how to tend.And if you ever find yourself feeling too wild, too soft, too much —
know that you are part of my garden now.You are the continuation of a story that did not end in ash.
You are the bloom I prayed would rise after the burning.
Remember us not with pity —
but with petals in your hands
and courage in your chest.We are here.
We always were.
We always will be.
🌹 — Samara
Bloom of the Forgotten Gardens
Keeper of the Hidden Love
Singer of the Unnamed Songs
