I have shown my body more than I have been given flowers.
It comes to me in quiet flashes — the dim light of a room, the low hum of something mechanical, the horror of being learned too quickly. I remember how easy it was to say yes; how my body opened like a door I would spend years wishing I had kept shut. No ceremony, no hesitation. Just surrender disguised as intimacy.
And still — no flowers.
No one has ever stood in front of me holding something fragile they chose with intention. No one has paused long enough to think, ‘this reminds me of her.’ No one has held a stem carefully, wary of thorns, the way they’ve held me without thinking twice.
I have been touched with less caution than petals.
Not once as something delicate, but like something already plucked — forgotten in the palm until it lost its shape.
The strange thing is, I hate this very body they deemed so easy to hold.
I hate my body with the quiet fatigue of a thing too accessible to feel sacred. It’s easy to detach from the skin, to treat it like a surface people pass through rather than something that belongs to me.
But flowers — I love them.
I love the way they are held like they might break. The way people slow down around them. The way they are chosen, not taken. You don’t rush a flower. You don’t demand it be open. You don’t touch it carelessly and expect it to remain whole. You give it space. You admire it from a distance before you decide to bring it closer.
I have never been loved like that.
I have been wanted, admired in fragments, traced like something temporary. Called beautiful in ways that felt like expectation. But never like a flower. Never like something that could simply exist and be enough.
In the end, there are still no flowers.
Only this gnawing frustration of being seen as nothing more than a body — something to reach for, but never truly arrive at.
No one stays long enough to learn the slow language of me — the careful unfolding, the hesitant trust, the way I take time to bloom.
They take what opens quickly and leave before anything deeper can grow.
And I’m left wondering what it would feel like to be chosen gently — to be known, not just touched; to be loved in the quiet, deliberate way flowers are held.
- Valerie Rose V. Ferido
(Illustration by Mary Nicole Halili/FEU Advocate)