Yuki was a quiet high school girl who preferred the pages of books to the noise of crowds. Each spring, she would sit under the same old sakura tree in Maruyama Park, reading poetry while the cherry blossoms danced on the breeze like pink snow.
One afternoon during Hanami, as laughter and music filled the park, a boy with a sketchbook sat nearby. His name was Haru. He was a transfer student from Tokyo, passionate about drawing, but shy when it came to people.
For days, neither spoke to the other. But Yuki noticed he always drew the same tree she sat under. One day, a breeze flipped her book shut, and Haru shyly walked over to return a page that had torn free and blown his way.
"You come here a lot," he said, eyes on the tree rather than her.
"So do you," she replied with a faint smile.
That was the beginning.
They began to talk. Slowly. Softly. About poems and sketches, memories and dreams. Yuki read him her favorite tanka poems. Haru showed her the way he saw the world through his pencil.
By the time the blossoms began to fall for the last time that season, Haru gave her a drawing—of the tree, of her under it, smiling with a book in her hand. In the corner, he had written a single line in Japanese:
"僕の春は君だった."
"You were my spring."
Tears welled in her eyes—not out of sadness, but because she realized she had fallen in love, gently and quietly, like petals drifting on the wind.
And every year after that, even as they grew and changed, they met under the same tree—still reading, still drawing, still in love beneath the cherry blossoms.