The sakura tree by Halcyon Library, just beyond the old campus, has always been our shared anomaly.
All throughout our senior year, we would have our clandestine rendezvous every night beneath the thin branches.
Every spring, we pondered for pink petals that never quite bloomed. The tree always stayed bare, its branches stretching towards the sky like it was reaching for something it couldn’t quite touch, while the world around it performed its annual resurrection. The lawns greened, flowers erupting in reckless colour; yet the tree remained bare.
We would talk for hours on end about anything and everything. Time never so obviously seemed like a human concept until those nights. It felt like time stood still, and the universe decided we were bigger than we actually were. Like we were more than just ancient stardust floating around space while the radiation travelling from a nearby supernova explosion was out to get us.
I still remember the moment our eyes first met. It was at Daniel’s 5th house party of the semester.
I always knew of you, but never knew you.
“The golden boy,” they referred to you as. The one who moved through crowds like gravity bent around you. I always envisioned you to be the typical jock that broke hearts everywhere he went, collecting cheerleaders like it was a second job.
I looked at you through jade-coloured glasses for you to take them off me and rewrite the constellations I thought were mapped in place.
“Can I get you a drink?” a voice like aged whiskey poured over smooth ice whispered behind me.
I looked back and saw you with your messy hair, cheeky smile with dahlia dimples, with the kind of confidence that made it seem like the world had never told you no before. Little did I know my “yes” was the butterfly that flapped its wings and triggered a cascade of moments that eventually led us back beneath that sakura tree, night after night, building galaxies out of conversations.
At first, it lived in the margins. The way you shadowed me back to the dorms to make sure I got back safely. A playlist passed between us that soon became the cartography of our hearts. And the coffee, always the velvet latte, appearing each morning like a small, dark sacrament, even as your eyes teased me for a habit you secretly adored.
The kind of moments that never announce themselves as important while they are happening. They simply accumulate like quiet stardust.
Before long, those late-night meetings beneath the sakura tree became a ritual.
You would arrive first most nights, leaning into the bark like the tree had been waiting its whole life to hold you up. Evening light would spill through your black hair, trace the edge of your jaw, and there you’d be, effortless and golden at the edges, as if the dusk itself had painted you just for me to see.
Some nights we spoke about the future with the kind of reckless certainty only twenty-one-year-olds possess.
You wanted to see the northern lights. You wanted to backpack through Europe. You wanted to experience snow on the beach. You wanted to write something that would outlive us.
You once said the universe was far too large for anything to be truly meaningless. “Even collisions create new stars,” you said, looking up at the empty branches above us. “Maybe that’s all we are too. Just cosmic accidents that learned to speak.”
I chuckled, but part of me believed you. Those nights felt strangely infinite. The world beyond that small patch of grass would fall silent while we sat there restlessly, trading stories and deep wounds that we would tell no one else.
I don’t recall when your hand stopped being an accident and started being a home. When your shoulder became a place I could lean without thinking. But I remember the first time I lay on your chest. How my body seemed to know the shape of yours before I did, how I fit there like I’d been returning to that spot my whole life.
Yet we never addressed it. Afraid of disrupting something fragile but secretly hoping it was a slow burn that would eventually blaze into something we couldn’t ignore. After all, time had always been generous with us and allowed us this many nights; why wouldn’t it allow a few more?
On this particular night beneath the tree, the air carried the faint promise of spring. You were unusually quiet that night. And I knew without an explanation that you needed me there that night of all nights. Not for words, just for presence. Just for the weight of me beside you while the earth continued its slow arc around the Sun.
I laid with my head on your chest, letting my world be consumed with the rhythm your heart sang. Your fingers traced lazy patterns through my hair.
Then your voice came as soft as a bruise, “What do you think will happen to us?”
Still with my head buried in your chest, I answered, “What do you mean?”
“When we’re gone,” you replied.
The question hung there, heavier than the night air. Beneath my cheek, I heard your heart had quickened. I could have asked “why?” or “what’s wrong?” I could have read the fear hiding beneath your steady voice. Instead, I looked up at the branches, at the stars scattered like salt on black cloth.
I shrugged as best I could without leaving my place on your chest. “Probably the same thing that happens to everyone else.”
“Which is?”
“We return to the universe.”
A pause. I felt the rise and fall of your breath deepen. Then you smiled. I felt it before I saw it, the way your chest shifted beneath me.
“Good,” you whispered. “Then at least we won’t be lost.”
Then your hand found mine in the dark, fingers lacing together.
At the time, I figured it was just another one of our late-night philosophical detours. The kind of midnight where the world felt too small and we needed to make it bigger.
I wish I canonized the cadence of the shift of your heartbeat, or the way your fingers paused in my hair when you said “lost.”
I didn’t realize it would be the last conversation we’d ever have.
Three days later I got the call. Your mom was bawling and could only mutter out “Honey, I am so sorry.”
I just knew.
The golden boy. Gone at twenty-two.
My golden boy.
I couldn’t even cry at first. It hadn’t set in yet. I just sat on my bed where we used to lay. Staring at the playlist you made me, at the cold velvet latte growing warm on my desk—the one you left me outside my door that morning with a sticky note that said “see you tonight, my Little Star.”
I never got to say it. Neither did you.
All those nights beneath our tree. All those almost-moments. All that slow burn we were too afraid to name; it would remain forever unfinished. A sentence without a period. The faint scent of rain in the air, but the storm never quite broke.
I stopped going to our tree after that. I couldn’t even go to the Halcyon Library anymore. Not without you leaning against it, and without your chest for me to lie against.
Years passed.
I graduated. Moved cities. Went to see the northern lights. Backpacked through Europe. Experienced snow on the beach. Still kept the sticky note you wrote me.
The girl from Daniel’s 5th party wouldn’t recognize me. I transcended into someone braver. Someone who doesn’t wait for things to happen anymore.
Someone you would’ve been proud of.
I still think of you often. The first few years, you lingered like a tattoo kiss, haunting all my what-ifs. But gradually, you turned into the only language I could speak. You seeped into the way I loved, the way I spoke, the way I noticed the small things. The cold velvet latte I still order. The way I walk people home.
You didn’t just exist beside me. You became part of my architecture.
I didn’t plan to go back. But thirteen minutes south of Halcyon on a random Friday in early spring, my feet led me there before my mind could object.
And there it was. Our sakura tree.
Except this time, it’s finally in bloom.
Soft pink petals on every single branch, drifting hazily towards the ground like quiet confessions. I stood beneath it for what felt like eons, watching the blossoms fall. One petal landed gently at my feet. Then one on my hair where you used to lay your hand. Then another. And another.
I used to believe I was destined to bloom by your side. But life and the universe have a way of rewriting what I believe growth is supposed to look like.
Although time did not allow us the life we once rooted for beneath these branches, you were still the season that taught me how to bloom. The ariose floods of your voice were the ones that told me the universe was too vast for anything to truly be meaningless.
If somehow, I could cause the thaumaturgy of another clandestine rendezvous with you to tell you our sakura finally bloomed, I would brave the Pacific Ocean and sail past the sirens to have that ephemeral excursion.
While our time together will only be a mere dent in the universe’s timeline, it will always be my big infinity.
