Mother [portable]: Sakura Sakurada

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.”

I finally cry. Would you like a different interpretation—for example, a poetic haiku sequence, a fictional dialogue, or a character study for a story? sakura sakurada mother

Our apartment was not a cherry blossom field. It was a single room that smelled of soy sauce, mildew, and her cheap coffee. She worked the night shift at a bento factory, shaping rice into perfect little mounds, placing a single pickled plum in the center like a red sun. I would wake to find her asleep on the floor, a half-eaten onigiri still in her hand, her fingers swollen from the salt. She turned to me

“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.” You can be the blossom

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.

A petal lands on my hand. It is not soft. It is wet. It smells like rain on old stone.