Blossom

Chapter One: The Letter

Ha-eun found the letter tucked inside her brother's old jacket, three years after he disappeared.

It had been sitting in the back of the closet the whole time, folded into a small square, the ink faded from handling. She almost missed it -- her hands were only searching the pockets out of habit, the way she always checked before donating his old things to charity. But her fingers caught on paper, and when she unfolded it, she recognized her brother Tae-woo's handwriting immediately, messy and slanted the way it always was.

If you're reading this, I probably didn't make it back in time for the blossoms. Look for me where the mountain trees bloom first -- you know the place. I'll be waiting, even if I'm late.

There was no date. No explanation of where he'd gone, or why he'd left a note in a jacket instead of just telling her. Tae-woo had always been like that -- quiet about the things that mattered most, loud about everything else.

Three years since the police had closed his case. Three years since everyone else in her family had stopped looking.

Ha-eun read the letter twice, then began packing a bag.

Chapter Two: The Mountain

She knew the place he meant. Baekhwa Mountain, two hours outside the city, where their grandmother used to take them every spring to see the wild cherry trees bloom before anywhere else in the province. Tae-woo had loved it there as a boy -- used to run ahead of everyone on the trail, arms out, letting the falling petals catch in his hair.

The drive up felt longer than she remembered. The roads had changed, new guardrails, a gas station where there used to be nothing but pine trees. But when she reached the base of the mountain and stepped out of the car, the air still smelled the way it always had -- damp earth and something sweet just beginning to open.

She started up the trail alone, her breath fogging in the cool morning air, the letter folded in her coat pocket like a compass.

Villagers she passed gave her curious looks. A young woman climbing the mountain by herself, asking strangers if they'd seen a man matching an old photograph -- tall, sharp-jawed, a scar above his left eyebrow from a childhood bicycle accident. Most shook their heads. One elderly man selling roasted chestnuts near the trailhead paused for a long moment, studying the photo before handing it back.

"There's someone who lives up past the ridge," he said slowly. "Keeps to himself. Moved here maybe two, three years back. Never learned his name."

Ha-eun's chest tightened. "Which way?"

He pointed with his chin toward a narrow path breaking off from the main trail, half-hidden by overgrown brush. "Not many go that way. Trees are thickest there. But that's where the blossoms come first, if that's what you're after."

Chapter Three: What the Mountain Kept

The path was harder than the main trail, steep and narrow, roots breaking through the packed dirt like knuckles. Ha-eun climbed for nearly an hour before the trees began to change -- the plain pines giving way to something older, gnarled cherry trees that had clearly stood on this ridge for decades, maybe longer, untouched by anyone's careful pruning.

And then she saw them. Blossoms, pale pink and impossibly early for the season, scattered across the clearing like something out of a dream she used to have as a child.

There was a small wooden cabin at the far edge of the clearing, smoke curling faintly from a stovepipe chimney.

Her legs felt unsteady as she crossed the open ground. She didn't call out. She didn't know, yet, what she would say, or who might open that door -- her brother, a stranger, no one at all.

The door opened before she reached it.

The man standing there was thinner than she remembered, his hair longer, a beard he'd never worn before. But the scar above his left eyebrow was the same. His eyes were the same.

"Tae-woo," she said, and the name came out broken, like something she'd been carrying too long and finally set down.

He didn't move for a moment. Then his face crumpled, the way it used to when he was small and had done something he knew was wrong. "I didn't think anyone would still be looking," he said quietly. "I didn't think I deserved for anyone to."

Chapter Four: Why He Stayed

He made her tea in a chipped ceramic cup, the two of them sitting on the wooden step outside the cabin while petals drifted down around them, settling in her hair, on her shoulders, the same as when they were children.

He told her everything, slowly, like a man unused to speaking after years of silence. The debt he'd fallen into. The people he'd owed money to, the threats that followed. He hadn't run from his family, he said -- he'd run to protect them, certain that if he stayed, the danger chasing him would find its way to their door instead of his.

"I meant to come back sooner," he said. "Every spring, I told myself, this is the year. And then I'd think about everything I'd have to explain, everything I'd have to face, and I'd stay another season instead."

"You could have written more than one letter," Ha-eun said, though there was no real anger in it anymore, only exhaustion, and underneath that, relief so large it frightened her.

"I know." He looked down at his hands, wrapped around his own cup. "I'm sorry. I kept thinking I'd wait until the debt was gone, until I was someone worth coming back to. I didn't realize that was never going to happen on its own. I just kept getting older on this mountain instead."

Ha-eun reached over and took his hand, the way she used to when they were small and crossing a street together, her grip firm enough to remind him he wasn't imagining her, wasn't dreaming this either.

"You're already someone worth coming back to," she said. "You always were. That was never the part you needed to fix."

Epilogue: The Trees Remember

They walked down the mountain together the next morning, Tae-woo carrying a single bag, leaving the cabin behind the way a person finally sets down something they'd been holding for too long.

The debts would still need to be faced. The years apart couldn't simply be undone, and there would be hard conversations waiting at home -- with their parents, who had grieved him as though he were dead, with a world that had moved on without him in it. But for the first time in three years, Tae-woo was walking toward something instead of away from it.

Behind them, the wild cherry trees on the ridge kept blooming, the way they always had, the way they always would, whether or not anyone climbed high enough to see them.

Ha-eun liked to think, later, that the mountain had simply been keeping her brother safe until she was ready to come find him -- holding him the way the blossoms held onto the last of winter's cold, right up until the moment they finally, quietly, let go.

© Rehan Azam,'The Colour of Waiting' An Short story by Rehan Azam , All Rights Reserved.