She turned to me. Her eyes were the color of the bark. “I named you Sakura so you would not have to choose. You can be the blossom. I will be the trunk.”
“This is where I learned to hate beautiful things,” she said, not to me, but to the air. “My father spent all our money planting these trees. He said a man who grows beauty cannot be poor. My mother starved while he pruned branches.” sakura sakurada mother
I touch the trunk. It is rough, scarred, cool from the morning rain. I press my forehead against it. She turned to me
One spring, when I was eleven, she took me to the old Sakurada plot. Nothing was left but a cracked foundation and one enormous, ancient cherry tree. The house had burned down a decade before I was born. She stood beneath it, the wind pulling strands of gray from her black hair. You can be the blossom