The Universe is made of stories

It looked like falling snow.

It filled up the sky, filled up our field of vision – swaying, drifting white, white, white.

Except, it wasn’t cold. If anything, it reminded of warmth, perhaps simply because it was warm, or perhaps because there was also some red among all the dancing, falling white.

The open blossoms fell among the lined trees, splendid, and ephemeral at the same time.  

“Wow,” I couldn’t help but say in admiration, unconsciously stopping as soon as I fixed my eyes on that spectacle.  

“Amazing,” commented Gourry, my travel companion. He stopped too, enthralled by the dancing blossoms. “Say, Lina, what kind of flowers are those?”

“Dunno. I’ve never seen them back where we come from,” I replied.

A little while before, for a number of reasons, Gourry and I had been sent away to an unknown, faraway land. We’d found ourselves under this sky as we were trying and get back where we came from, on a clueless and unsuccessful journey.

I’d travelled here and there in the land I used to live in before, but I’d never seen those flowers. Meaning they probably only blossomed here.

“Cherry blossoms!” The girl called Ran, who’d become our travel companion ever since we got here, suddenly blurted out, in a strange voice.

She often used weird expressions, which, according to her, were in her hometown’s dialect.

“Huh? What, now?”

“The name of the flowers – cherry blossoms.”

“Ah. They are called ‘cherry blossoms’.” I looked at them again.

The mountains stretching out in front of us were green. However, at their foot, the colors of what appeared to be ‘cherry blossoms’ trees lining along the highway formed a long streak of white, continuing as far as we could see.

The fact that they were only along the highway and not on the mountains made me think that they hadn’t grown naturally, and had been planted. But why on earth were hundreds – heck, thousands of trees planted like that?

“To have grown so many trees… must have been some sophisticated and eccentric king or lord!”

“Wrong!”

“What’s wrong?”

“It wasn’t a king who grew them, just one common person.”

“Huh?!” As the meaning of her words struck me, I couldn’t help but raise my voice. “Wait, wait, wait! A single person, growing these many trees on their own? That shouldn’t be possible!”

“They were not on their own.”

“Didn’t you just say it was just one person?”

“After they’d started working hard to grow them, the people around here came to help too.”

“… Right.” Her way of expressing things was always a bit confusing.   

“Still, why did those people feel the need to grow that many trees? Are their fruits edible, by any chance?”

It wasn’t elegant of Gourry to ask, but truth is, it did happen sometimes that trees that bore edible fruits were planted along highways, in order to lower the chance of travelers collapsing from hunger or thirst.

When asked that, Ran furrowed her brow. “Mmm… they do bear fruits and those fruits are edible, but… they are not that good?”

Judging by her words, she had tried them before. Perhaps, they were extremely bitter or sour.

Gourry, probably anticipating that he, too, wouldn’t enjoy the taste, wore a dejected expression. “Not good? Why, getting plenty of delicious fruit like that would have been perfect…”

“What are you talking about?” I said, still enthralled by the white. “This scene itself is perfect, isn’t it?” A particularly strong gust of wind made the petals dance.

“Perhaps, the person who started to plant the trees did it because he wanted to see something like this, too.”

That one scope. Perhaps, he’d kept on with that one scope in mind. Perhaps, that person had seen something like this in his past, and burned with desire for seeing it again.

Perhaps, the people around that person had been moved by that love and enthusiasm, and decided to lend a hand.

The earth-moving passion and effort of one person, stirring up other people… that wasn’t common, but it did happen, sometimes. And as a result…

… as a result, now, we were in that place, surrounded by blooming white.

Perhaps, one day, Gourry and I would be back where we came from, far away from there. And still, we wouldn’t forget the scene we’d seen that day.