Mother, Sister, Daughter, Sakura
Vikki C.
This world is wounding itself. I walk through the conflict, avoiding the churches, the in-laws and all acts of confession. My lithe body, barely a nightdress, floating south and south again, until I reach my youth. Quiet feet wading through the boulevard of pink cherry blossoms from another heaven.
Dad leaves the petals unswept over the lawn, to hide the unkempt yellow grass from Mum, or to mask the scars in advance. The driveway is blanketed too, and the car is still covered with the darker pink petals from the hospice visit. We let them be.
Ordinary men say famous artists only paint almond blossoms as a distraction from the asylum. That if we fill our eyes with portraits of spring and promise, bright buds on blue, we would be cured for a little while, enough time to find the exit. That insanity would not encroach with its heavy black bough, latching the door from the inside out.
But now it’s 2023, and I’m at Kensington cemetery paying respects to the latest victims of tragedy. The cherry trees are weeping heavily over the wet lichened graves, mourning about me leaving too early that one winter Sunday, naively hurrying to a lover in my next life. Your pale face at the small window washed in evening light, as if watching from the other side – seeing the divorce and all the babies swept away to far-off territories. Unreachable.
Occasionally, they call home, pretending to keep me alive. They’re a hardy species known to weather the harsh winters in places cut off by cold wars. Bombs, crisis, severance. The signal is lost after a minute, but I know they remember the womb like a safe haven.
Still, there are brave men who carry injured women like me to safety, comforting us with white lies: dusting the shrapnel from our hair, brushing it off as just sakura. They tell us that the flowerless vase in the hallway is shattered – but maybe the house can be salvaged.
That there are girls with minds like mine. Daughters who are fragile blooms, caught in the middle of battlefields. And as much as they belong with us, we can never carry them home safely, without the petals coming apart in our hands.
