That Year, the Gardenias Had Yet to Fully Bloom

[Reunion + Mutual Devotion + Whirlwind Marriage + Deep, Anguished Romance]

At seventeen, the wind always carried the damp fragrance of gardenias. It curled the corners of the countdown chart on the classroom’s back wall and tousled the hems of the uniforms brushing past in the corridor.

He was carrying a stack of homework around the stairwell when he saw her stretching on tiptoe to reach the half-blooming gardenia on the windowsill. Its snowy petals still cupped pale green buds, as if hiding half a sentence on the tip of its tongue. “Careful, you’ll fall.” His voice bounced off the tiled wall, making her hand jerk. Water droplets from the flowerpot splashed onto the pristine white sleeve of his uniform.

She always said that was where her bad luck began. Whenever he collected homework, he lingered two seconds longer by her desk. The poetry book she secretly read had one of his discarded sheets of calculations tucked inside. Even the sun hat blown away during sports day landed right beside the track where he was running the 800 meters. But the hearts of young people were more tangled than unopened gardenias. She threw the bandage he offered her into the trash, and he crumpled the apology note she had tucked into her desk.

In noisy, cicada-filled June, the gardenia finally bloomed, filling the room with its sweet fragrance. But beside the gardenia bushes behind the school building, they had their fiercest argument. Red-eyed, she said, “You don’t understand at all.” Clenching his fists, he shouted, “You never say anything.” Windblown petals clung to her cheek, where her tears had not yet dried, and fell onto his crumpled uniform collar.

Neither of them looked back.

In the years that followed, the gardenias at the mouth of the alley bloomed luxuriantly every year. They had simply become the sharpest crease in each other’s youth. When they met again at the next corner, the fragrance in the wind still smelled just as it had that year. But when their eyes met, all that remained was a silence colder than gardenias after they had withered.