I have seen flowers bloom in valleys, and I have seen them bloom in deserts –
One is not more beautiful than the other.

One woke up to the golden sun, cradled in the silver rain’s soft lullaby,
The other needed to snake through corpses of its predecessors to taste the breeze dancing above the soil.
But both the valley-born and the desert-forged ended up in the same bouquet a boy gave me yesterday.
And I couldn’t help but admire them equally,
though I forgot to ask who suffered more.

They say it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
But do we truly care about anyone’s journey or healing?
To the observer, a flower is a flower; its story forgotten beneath its petals.
The assiduous journey of the desert flower, with all its setbacks, means everything to itself and nothing to the vase.

So I wonder:
Would it be such a loss if the flower never broke through the sand?
Would it be less of a tragedy if it never bloomed at all?