For you
A ghost of warmth, a breath , a name.
Diksha
A flicker lost in longing’s maze.
Creative Direction Diksha
Photography Djenice Duarte
Styling Flávio Ribeiro
Make-up Diksha
Model Francisco Albino
Studio class x studio
Words Daniela Abranches
Flowers are the most common Valentine’s gift, they are almost unavoidable. Not only because they symbolize love, but because they are love, expressed across different moments – they are able to translate it.
Flowers step in when words feel insufficient. They become a language for emotions that feel too delicate, too vulnerable, or too complicated to articulate.
And like any language, flowers can say many things.
Sometimes they speak of presence. Sometimes they arrive in its place – like a Ghost of Warmth. An attempt to soften absence, to excuse neglect, to replace what cannot be offered in body. Flowers often represent what remains when love is no longer embodied.
But flowers do not only appear in moments of loss. They also mirror how love first enters us.
Quietly. Like Breath.
Love arrives softly, almost unnoticed — something we inhale without thinking, it enters us and we cant fully controll. Slowly, it fills us and become overwhelming.
Suddenly, what began as something delicate becomes an avalanche of feeling we struggle to contain.
In those moments, flowers try to speak for us.
Naming itself is an act of intimacy.
To tell someone you love them, and being able to explain why, requires vulnerability most of us hesitate to offer. This is why gestures often arrive first. We reach for symbols when language feels too exposed.
Giving flowers becomes one of those gestures. A nonverbal language.
Valentine’s Day simply ritualizes a collective attempt to make emotion visible.
If we return to something simpler, love often begins passionate, as A Flicker — experimental, curious, physical.
In this context, with it’s deep colors, open petals, closeness to skin, flowers suggest longing, attraction, vulnerabilit, almost like emotional bodies — offering themselves, inviting touch.
But somewhere along the way, love changes.
It softens. It slows. It becomes lighter. Lost in a Longings Maze.
Admiration takes over, possession gives way to care. This is often when we discover love in its purest form: affection without control, presence, care.
Across all these meanings, one truth remains.
Flowers expose love’s contradiction: it wants to last forever, yet it lives in fleeting moments. We offer something fragile because love itself is fragile. And in that brief beauty, flowers make love visible — in its tenderness, and in its quiet power to overwhelm.
To boot…
Djenice Duarte, photographer
@j_dphotographer
Diksha, Makeup artist
@_ahskid_
More on ZOOT from Djenice Duarte here.
