The Weight of a Petal

I keep a pressed jasmine flower inside the pages of a dictionary, its color long ago surrendered to the dry, brittle shade of parchment. It is a fragile thing, so thin that it threatens to crumble into dust if I breathe too heavily upon it. Yet, it holds the weight of a summer afternoon that would have otherwise evaporated into the ether. We collect these small, organic fragments—a bloom, a stone, a lock of hair—as if they could anchor us to the people we once were. We are terrified that if we do not keep the physical evidence of our tenderness, the memory itself will lose its shape. We cling to the soft, the fleeting, and the quiet, hoping that by preserving the petal, we might somehow preserve the innocence of the hand that once held it. Is it the flower we are trying to save, or is it the version of ourselves that still knew how to look at it without sorrow?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has taken this beautiful image titled Her Eyes and the Flower. It captures that same delicate tension between a person and the small, living thing they choose to hold. Does this portrait make you wonder what else she might be keeping safe?