Under the Sakura Trees

September 22, 2010

Under the Sakura Trees

     The smell of cherry blossom incense filled the room as we lay on his bed snacking on Pocky and watching an anime. The room was always close to pitch black and freezing, so it was perfect for relaxation. Well, it was for us. Zane grew up in Oregon and I in New Jersey. I always felt at home in this magnificent room. The floorboards creaked but I didn’t mind. Zane’s bed squeaked with every toss and turn and I was always terrified that I’d move the wrong way and hit his wall of a million masks. They were all bizarre and from all over the world. They had belonged to his mother and now they belonged to him.

     I knew that room like I knew myself. I knew him like I knew myself. Every inch of the room, every crease in the sheets and every wrinkle in the walls. For six and a half months it was my sanctuary. But when he left for college in September, it all went away.  The smell of incense, the masks, the squeaks and creaks, the black, the cold… everything.

      When I had first met Zane, he was a senior and I was a sophomore. We both worked the same hours at Jimmy John’s, went to the same high school and had classes right next to each other. We even lived on the same street. Every morning and every night we would get into his little blue Honda Fit to start or end our day. He decided his car was a girl named Lenneth Valkyrie and I listened in awe as he told me all about Lenneth’s origins in Norse Mythology.

     “Lenneth is known as the Blue-Haired Angel as she is one of the main three Valkyries of Asgard, along with her sisters Silmeria and Hrist. Her job is to find suitable warriors on the verge of valiant death to serve as Einherjar (undead soldiers) against the enemies of Asgard in the coming of Ragnarok. She’s essentially a Norse grim reaper. I named her that because she claimed my soul when I was looking for a car –plus she’s blue.”

     He was brilliant and quirky. Wonderful grades in school, researched on his own for fun and the papers he wrote for his English class blew my mind. As I read them, I found myself transfixed. I admired him throughout our relationship and hoped that I could one day be perfect for him. Once college time came around, he took off to California and left me, shattered, here in Texas.

     I’ve hated Texas since I moved here back in 2004. My parents divorced and my dad was being deployed to Iraq. My mother hated New Jersey and felt the only solution to make life easier was to go back home. She took me and my brothers away from the family we knew and loved in Jersey out of selfishness and I hated her for it. I hated everything including this new state that held me prisoner. I became belligerent, bitter and depressed for the next few years until I met Zane. He changed everything.

     After I met Zane, I became a more optimistic person. I loved people, I loved life and I loved school. He made me a happy person and made me more enjoyable for other people to be around. I was happy for once in my life and felt alive. Then, he had the college talk with me.

     “Do you really want to know where I’m going to college?” he asked for the first time.

     Until then, he always evaded my questions of his future.

     “Of course,” I responded not wanting to sound too enthusiastic.

     “The University of California at Santa Cruz.”

     “…You’re kidding, right?” I was terrified at the thought of losing him.

     “No. It’s my dream school and I’ve been accepted.”

     I was unable to sputter out any sort of argument.

     My heart dropped and my breathing quickened. The world I had built in that room started crumbling before my eyes and I felt I was going to collapse with it. I tried to go back and imagine I had never heard what he said. California. That’s why he didn’t want to tell me.

     For the next few months I tried to be perfect to keep him with me. I didn’t care if he was going to California—I didn’t want to lose him. Whenever I asked him about us, he said that we would stay together but I still worried day after day. Eventually he came clean and confessed that he planned on leaving me when he left for California. I was crushed and spent the rest of our relationship trying to change his mind. In the end, he still left me although it was heart breaking for the both of us. He said he needed to have that college experience and didn’t want to be held back by a girlfriend. I hated everything again. More importantly, I hated him. It felt like all I did for the next few months was sulk around. Whenever I thought about him, I wanted to cry. I never wanted to see him again and I wanted all my feelings for him to vanish.

     Zane came back that December for Christmas break. I saw him for a few days and then left to New Jersey to go see my family for the next two weeks. By the time I came back to Texas, he was gone. A part of me missed him and wallowed in sorrow but the other part of me didn’t care. He had hurt me beyond belief and made me feel like I had failed myself because of my failed attempt to keep us together. For the next half a year, we wrote each other and my feelings for him softened. I couldn’t wait for him to come back for the summer but I wouldn’t admit it. I tried to change my feelings for him since he had convinced me that his feelings for me were nothing more than the love like that of a good friend or family member. I of course was crushed but I accepted everything he threw at me and carried on as best I could.

     Summer came and Zane came back to Texas. A few days passed and we decided to go for a walk. We walked for hours until the sun rose and talked about everything we had been holding back on. The rest of the summer I found myself back in his cold, dark room with him every day after school watching anime and eating Pocky. The smell of cherry blossom incense filled the air just like before. The same boards in the floor creaked and his wall of masks towered over us. I was back home and I realized I never hated him. I still loved him, but now I loved him even more than I had a year and a half before. A part of me felt like an idiot. I was setting myself up for disaster and didn’t care. As long as I was with him, I didn’t care.

     Over the summer, we both realized how much we had changed in the past year and how much we really loved each other. Once September came around, it was time to say good bye again. I didn’t think I could handle losing him yet again, but I promised him I’d be strong. We ended the summer on a very positive note and we look forward to Spring Break to see each other again. Only this time, I’ll be going to California and we may not have to let each other go again. We hope sometime in the future to go to Japan together and sit under the cherry blossom trees, or the Sakura trees as the Japanese call them. I can imagine it now: billows of cherry blossom leaves conquer the air we walk through. He wishes to show me the world and I wouldn’t want to see it with anyone other than him.