They make growing look effortless. A tiny seed disappears beneath the soil, unseen and forgotten, and then one morning, somehow, there is a green stem reaching toward the light. No announcement. No explanation. Just proof that something was happening underneath the surface all along.

I think about flowers whenever I think about us.

Maybe because, lately, I have begun to understand that not everything that looks dead is actually dead.

For months, I watched something between us change.

The warmth became distance. Conversations became shorter. The person who once knew exactly how to make me feel loved suddenly seemed to have forgotten the language. There were days when a simple “hmm” felt like an entire paragraph of rejection. Days when I wondered whether I had imagined everything- the closeness, the affection, the comfort, the feeling that perhaps this person was somewhere I could finally rest. And like a flower that has been left without sunlight, I began to wilt too.

I stopped expecting.

Or at least, I tried to.

Because sometimes the hardest part of loving someone isn’t losing them.

It is watching them become a stranger while they are still technically there.

Flowers know something about this.

A flower does not spend its entire life blooming. There are seasons when petals fall. Seasons when branches look bare. Seasons when the garden seems completely abandoned.

But we rarely call a tree dead simply because it has lost its leaves.

We call it winter.

Perhaps that is what happened to us.

Perhaps we mistook a season for an ending.

Because suddenly, after months of coldness, something changed.

A voice that had once felt distant became familiar again.

There was laughter.

There was that smile.

There were words I had almost forgotten how much I wanted to hear

“ I missed you”.

And somehow, four words were enough to bring an entire garden back to life inside me.

He called me “love” again.

He told me I’m beautiful.

He told me he wasn’t leaving.

And I wish I could explain what that did to me without making it sound dramatic.

But some sentences don’t simply enter your ears.

They travel through every place that has been hurting for months; I had been trying to convince myself that I could survive his absence. I had been learning to expect less, to stop checking, to stop wondering why his replies were so cold, to pretend that seeing him grow distant didn’t hurt.

And then suddenly, there he was again.

Not completely different.

Not a stranger.

Just…. him.

The person I remembered.

The person I had missed.

And perhaps that is why flowers are such dangerous things to compare ourselves to.

Because when a flower blooms again, we want to believe that everything is fixed.

But blooming does not erase the winter; the scars remain in the branches, and the roots remember the drought. And I think we do too.

I don’t want to pretend that everything between us is magically perfect now. I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. I don’t know whether this warmth will stay or whether another cold season will eventually come.

Maybe that uncertainty is the hardest part.

Because when you’ve already watched something beautiful disappear once, you become terrified of loving its return too much. You start holding the flower carefully, afraid that even your hands might crush it. But maybe love isn’t supposed to be about guaranteeing that nothing will ever hurt again. Maybe it is about understanding that something can be fragile and still be worth caring for.

A flower doesn’t ask the sky for a promise that it will never rain. It simply opens when the sun arrives.

Maybe I can learn to do that too.

Maybe I don’t have to know whether we will last forever. Maybe I don’t have to turn every conversation into a prediction of our future. Maybe I can appreciate the fact that after months of silence, we found our way back to a little warmth. And maybe that’s enough for now.

Because there is something beautiful about two people finding each other again after becoming unrecognisable to one another. Not because the past disappears.

But because, somehow, despite everything, there is still something alive underneath it.

A seed.

A root.

A possibility.

Perhaps that is what we are right now.

Not a fully bloomed flower.

Not a dead garden either.

Just something growing again.

Quietly.

Carefully.

Underneath everything that happened.

And if we are given enough sunlight, enough patience, enough honesty, perhaps one day we will look back at this strange season and realise that the flowers weren’t dying. They were only learning how to bloom differently.

And maybe I was too.

No one ever tells you that getting lost doesn’t happen all at once. It arrives politely. It slips through the cracks of ordinary days, disguising itself as exhaustion, as silence, as the habit of saying, “I’m fine “, until even you begin to believe it. One morning you wake up and realise you’ve been wandering for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to stand still.

That was my labyrinth.

It wasn’t built from stone or hidden beneath ancient ruins. It lived quietly beneath my skin, stitched together with unanswered questions, abandoned dreams, and the versions of myself I kept sacrificing to be accepted. Every corridor was lined with memories. Every turn carried the weight of a decision I wished I could undo. The strange thing about mazes is that every path looks like it might lead somewhere. Hope has a cruel way of disguising itself as another corner waiting to be turned.

So I kept walking.

I walked through rooms where I questioned my worth because someone else’s opinion had become louder than my own. I walked through hallways where love felt conditional, where friendships became fragile, and where silence was mistaken for peace. I wandered through places filled with people, yet somehow loneliness always reached me first. The walls never spoke, but they didn’t have to. They reflected every insecurity I tried to bury.

“Maybe you’re too much.”

“Maybe you’re not enough.”

“Maybe if you changed a little more, someone would finally stay.”

Those thoughts echoed through every corridor until they sounded less like fear and more like truth. I stopped recognising my own voice because it had become tangled with everyone else’s expectations. Somewhere between trying to be understood and trying not to be abandoned, I misplaced myself.

Perhaps that is the cruellest part of getting lost.

You don’t notice you’re disappearing until someone asks who you are, and the only answer you can give is a collection of roles you’ve played for other people.

For a long time, I searched for an exit. I believed there had to be one perfect door that would erase the sadness, the confusion and the weight I carried. I thought healing would arrive dramatically, like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

It didn’t.

Healing came quietly.

It arrived in the moments I chose honesty over pretending. In the days I allowed myself to grieve what I had lost instead of chasing what refused to stay. It came each time I stopped asking why I loved them, and started asking whether I had been loving myself at all.

The labyrinth did not disappear overnight.

Its walls still exist.

There are mornings when I accidentally wander into old corridors, where familiar doubts wait patiently for me to return, but now, I know something I didn’t know before.

Not every path deserves to be followed.

Not every voice deserves to be believed.

And not every ending is a failure simply because it hurts.

Sometimes, a maze isn’t a punishment. Sometimes it’s a place that strips away every mask you’ve ever worn until the only person left standing is the one you’ve been searching for all along.

Maybe that is why we survive the darkness.

Not because we become fearless, but because we finally learn that we can carry our own light.

I still don’t have a map.

I still take wrong turns.

There are days when the walls feel impossibly close, and the exit seems like a story meant for someone else. But when I look back now, I no longer see a girl trapped inside a labyrinth.

I see a girl who kept walking.

And perhaps courage was never about finding the way out.

Perhaps courage was choosing to believe that, somewhere beyond the next corner, I was waiting for myself.

There was a time when texting him required no thought. My fingers knew where to go before my mind did. Every good day, every bad day, every small inconvenience- I wanted to tell him first. He wasn’t just someone I loved. He was where I wanted him to be when life became too loud. He wasn’t just someone I loved and cared for. Everything changed overnight; I find myself staring at our old conversations for minutes, sometimes hours. I type. I erase. I rewrite. I close the app. Not because I have nothing to say, but somewhere along the way, the person I once ran to became the person I’m most afraid to text. I’m not afraid of a conversation. I’m afraid of what silence might say.

He wasn’t just another contact on my phone; he was my home, someone who stayed by my side when things were not right, someone who pushed me, someone who gave me his shoulder to cry on, someone who reminded me that even on the days I felt worthless, I was still worth loving. There were days when everything felt like it was falling apart. I didn’t need him to solve my problems; I just needed to hear him say, "You’ll be okay; I’m here for you”. Somehow, that was enough.

On days I couldn’t smile on my own, he would somehow manage to make me laugh-sometimes without even trying. The main reason why I trusted him so much is that he made me feel safe around him. I could be as vulnerable as I can get, be goofy and silly and most importantly, I could be myself around him without being judged- the version I usually hide from the world. It began with a simple “ Hi, how are you?” Somehow those conversations turned into inside jokes, random voice notes, and late-night video calls: “ Bro, you’re ridiculous, seriously lol”- and hours that never seemed long enough. Somewhere between those ordinary moments, I fell in love without realising it. Yeah, there were times when we both had pretty tough arguments and some cold war periods that never lasted more than a day. Slowly, the wind shifted towards him becoming distant and not communicating properly, which made me overthink, but I don’t blame him. I learned how quickly confidence can disappear when you start to fear that your words might push someone further away. The hardest part was not watching someone change, but it was watching myself fear the person I used to run to.