I raised her in a skull, but most of her life was spent in neglect. I left her outside in burning heat, then in sudden cold, dragged her indoors, then abandoned her again. She suffered thirst, darkness, and the bite of spidermites that stripped her leaves — though strangely, they spared the flowers, as if something in her bloom commanded a grim respect.
When her time came, I did not cut her. Growing is usually a preparation for harvest — you nurture only to take, always before death arrives on its own. I chose the opposite. I carried her down into the cellar for her final weeks, set her skull in the stone-lit dark, and simply let her decline. There she stood, a crown of fading flowers above hollow bone, turning slowly from bloom to ruin.
I left her to wither not by accident, but as proof. To show that a grow without harvest becomes its own message: that life, denied the cut, meets death as it is, unshaped, unclaimed. And in that cellar, in her vessel of bone, she embodied what I wanted to see — beauty not ended by hand, but surrendered to shadow.