This is a story that came to me, in drips, as I started to look into my own grief that I still carried with me after all this time.  

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

~ Rumi

Some flowers need to be alone, for some time, even if its lonely. They need to find themselves, and stand in their own light. 

The frost had returned suddenly one spring, killing off a small cluster of flowers, leaving only one.    

The little flower wept quietly in her grief and loneliness. She had never felt the shadows of the forest so heavily before, and she stopped believing the sun loved her.    

She looked towards the flowers of the field, standing like an array of colors under a soft blue sky. People walked among them, smiling, bending low to breathe in their scent and beauty. Children came playing, dancing, making wreaths in the colors of spring, pretending to be princes and princess, and fairies of the field. 

"If only I could be like them."  Thought the little flower longingly.    

She stretched and pulled on her leaves, willing them to unfurl, she tried to pry her own petals open, to make herself bigger, taller.    

“Look look. I’m here” she said, but try as she might her voice only came out a tiny squeak, her petals remained tight in a bud, and exhausted se gave up, shrinking back into herself.    

In the middle of the day the sky would brighten, and thin rays of light would tickle her leaves, making her tremble with yearning, yet she tighten even further.  

“No” She whispered, “I don’t trust you. I’m not letting you in.”

“You will hurt me. I don’t trust you” She said again, with tears streaming down her petals as the light retreated, and she remembered how happy and warm she had once been, how much it hard hurt when the frost came for her, freezing her, leaving her all alone.  

With the light gone, and the night falling once again, she bent her head and cried silently. But the stars were always watching, blinking down at her, and though she did not know it, she was never alone.