Chapter Text
The petals started a week ago.
At first it was just a few early bloomers, shy pink smudges at the edges of the branches on the street leading up to the hall. Now the trees are in full surrender, every small wind sending another soft avalanche down over black suits and white envelopes and the taxi queue that snakes along the curb.
By the time the service ends, the asphalt looks like someone’s shaken out a hundred handkerchiefs and forgotten to pick them back up.
The petals stick to wet shoes and the hem of my skirt and the glossy black of the hearse as it pulls away. The wind gusts once, hard enough to sting my face, and for a second it feels like the whole street is trying to tell me something.
Last time.
Pay attention.
Inside the hall, everything smells like incense and chrysanthemums and too‑strong coffee. Outside, it smells like cold air and exhaust and sugar from the convenience store where kids are buying melon bread on their way home from cram school. The world refuses to match the occasion. It never has.
Someone touches my elbow.
“Are you all right?” they ask.
I nod, because that’s the only answer that doesn’t invite more questions. The person’s face is blurred in my mind by the time they step back. A cousin? A coworker? One of the neighbours from the building.
The black sleeve, the slight bow, the polite pity on their face all look the same from this distance.
“I’m fine,” I say.
It’s not a lie. The air out here is different. Thinner. Easier to swallow, even when each breath feels like it has to navigate around a hard, foreign object in my chest.
The hall’s entrance has a low concrete stoop. I sit there, hands folded in my lap, like a child waiting to be told when it’s time to go home. My knees complain. My back complains more. My body has been counting the years even when my brain refused.
Your picture is propped up on that too‑bright altar where everyone can bow to it.
The you in the photo is somewhere in your thirties, maybe your forties. It’s hard to tell now that those years have folded into each other. Your eyes are doing that thing where they give nothing away to strangers and everything to me.
If I go back in, I’ll have to bow again. I’ll have to pretend this is the first goodbye and not the last in a long line of smaller ones.
So I stay outside, watching petals.
Above the roof of the hall, the sky is that thin spring blue that always makes buildings look like cutouts. The moon is already hanging there, faint but visible, as if it forgot to leave when the sun showed up and is now trying to blend into the background.
“The seasons are changing,” you’d said, pointing up at the slim arc.
Decades later, it’s still there. Crossing the same sky. Watching another set of people try to figure out how to keep moving.
Inside, someone starts another eulogy. The microphone distorts their voice. I make out your name, the honorifics, the phrases I’ve heard at every funeral we’ve ever attended: a life well lived, devoted, beloved, too soon, we remain, please watch over us.
I sit alone on the stoop while strangers and semi‑strangers file past your picture.
We promised, once, that we’d wait for one of us to die.
The temple bell down the street rings once, then again. People start to drift out of the hall now, blinking in the pale light as if the sky is too bright after the soft gloom of incense and chanting. Some pause to talk to me. Some don’t. Condolences flow past in practiced murmurs; the syllables slide over my shoulders and fall to the pavement with the petals.
I bow, thank them, say the right things.
I was prepared but not ready to be the one left standing.
When the crowd thins, I slip back inside.
I light another stick of incense, watching the smoke curl up in lazy, stubborn threads.
We never made a real plan for this part. Just a long series of jokes and romantic declarations, and then a long series of days where we thought we’d outsmarted the statistics by sheer stubbornness.
“I have one wish,” I tell your photo quietly. “But I’m not wasting it on going back.”
We did that enough in our heads. Looping ourselves through alternate universes where we didn’t make the choices we made, didn’t say what we did, didn’t try so hard to be better that we almost broke the thing we were trying to save. If the years taught me anything, it’s that I am not built for rewinds. Every time I tried to roll the tape back, I ended up tripping over my own feet in the present.
If I only get one wish, I want to say goodbye properly to the person I was yesterday. The one who still had you in every room, every bowl, every stray hair in the drain. The one who woke up not long ago in a world where your toothbrush was damp and your slippers were still by the door.
I bow because my body doesn’t know how else to mark this.
Then I turn and walk out, following the narrow path that winds around the side of the hall and down toward the river.
The trees along the embankment are in full bloom. People have already claimed tarps on the grass a little further down — families with bento boxes, office workers still in shirtsleeves, teenagers taking selfies with peace signs and filters. Life, rudely, continues. Somewhere, someone is falling in love for the first time under these exact branches.
I stop under one of the older trees, the one with the trunk thick enough that it would take both our arms, linked, to circle it. We used to come here when we didn’t have money for proper hanami, buying conbini onigiri and sitting on the low stone wall because we were too old for sidewalk dates and too young to care.
“We have to come here next year,” we’d said every year.
And now only one of us is here, under the tree we picked each time, trying to figure out what to do with a promise that outlived the scenario it was designed for.
Petals land in my hair. On my shoulders. On the back of my hands, scattered with age spots that make constellations you used to trace while pretending to read in bed.
I brush one petal off and let the others stick where they want. The river moves steadily beside me, carrying last year’s leaves and this year’s pollen and whatever else people have thrown into it downstream.
“I’m still here,” I tell the water. “Unfortunately for everyone.”
A jogger passes, earbuds in, oblivious. A little girl in a yellow raincoat even though it’s not raining stomps on a puddle just to hear the slap. Somewhere a dog barks, high and insistent.
The world is full of small, stupid noises, and for once, they don’t feel like an intrusion. They feel like proof.
We used to talk about reincarnation in half‑joking ways.
“If our feelings don’t change,” you’d say, “we’ll see each other again under that tree.”
The thing about decades is: you either grow into your metaphors or you shed them.
I thought I’d grow out of that version of us. The one that made stupid vows in kitchens and under cherry trees and in the quiet bruised minutes after fights. Instead, I find myself here, older and heavier and less inclined to pretend I don’t believe in anything, and the only words that feel honest are the ones we said when we were still too young to understand them.
We wait for one of us to die.
We belong to each other.
I’m lonely.
I say finally, softly enough that only the tree and maybe a very nosy crow can hear me. “I’ll meet you here again. If I can. If there’s anything after this.”
A breeze moves through the branches, sending down another flurry. Petals catch in my eyelashes; the river surface ripples. The moon, higher now, sharpens a little against the paling blue.
We never got an answer to whether any of this was “healthy.” Whether the way we clung to each other was acceptable by people who wrote books about attachment styles and drew diagrams with neat circles.
In the end, the only metric that mattered was: did we keep choosing it? Did we keep waking up and saying, “Yes. Still this. Still you”?
We did. Right up until one of us couldn’t wake up anymore.
“That has to count for something,” I tell the tree. “Right?”
No booming voice answers. No ray of light parts the clouds to bless my questionable coping. Somewhere, a kid starts singing a pop song off‑key. Somewhere else, a train rattles over the bridge.
I close my eyes.
I send whatever this is — a prayer, a wish, a bad signal — out into the air between the branches. I don’t ask for you back. We did our time. We got more than most. I just ask, very quietly, to not get lost without you. To keep walking forward without mistaking that for leaving you behind.
When I open my eyes again, nothing has changed.
The petals are still falling. The river is still moving in one direction. The moon is still pretending it’s not there.
“I’m going home,” I say, to you, to the tree, to myself. “You can haunt me whenever.”
On the way back up the path, a petal lands on my tongue when I laugh at my own joke. It tastes like nothing.
“The same moment will never happen twice.” You told me that once, when we were too tired to get off the sofa and too wired to sleep.
I didn’t understand then. I do now. It doesn’t mean there won’t be other moments. It just means I can stop trying to rewind this one.
I walk toward the hall, toward the family and friends and paperwork and whatever comes after the part where people bow and say they’re sorry. Above me, the sky keeps shifting colors, from afternoon to evening, from blue to a softer orange.
Behind me, under the cherry, the air is full of petals and the possibility that somewhere, you are watching over me.
Waiting for me.