A petal lands on my hand. It is not soft. It is wet. It smells like rain on old stone.
I touch the trunk. It is rough, scarred, cool from the morning rain. I press my forehead against it. sakura sakurada mother
She taught me that a cherry tree’s beauty is not in the falling petal, but in the bark. The gnarled, scarred, dark bark that survives the winter. A petal lands on my hand
I am Sakura. Named for the blossom itself. She used to say she planted me in the shadow of her name, so I would always know where the sun was. It smells like rain on old stone
My mother’s name was Sakurada before she married. Sakurada, meaning “cherry blossom field.” A name that promised softness, a carpet of petals, the fleeting perfection of spring. But my mother was not soft. She was the stone the cherry tree roots cracked open.
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.