A wish granted

Barcelona, Friday, 7^th February, 9pm. Joanna is getting ready for a night out at the Raval, while Pere waits for her reading a book in the living room. They are up for an experimental music event, led by one of Pere’s best friends, and then they’ll check out the new cocktail bar off Las Ramblas.

Rome, Friday, 7^th February, 8pm. After a romantic dinner with a glass or two of red wine, Joanna and Alessandro are holding hands while they walk along the river Tevere. The night is chilly but nice, that kind of coolness that stays in the air after a rain shower. They are meeting now some friends of him at a wine bar in San Lorenzo.

London, Saturday, 11^th January, 1am. Joanna is dancing the night away at a quite mainstream bar in Old Street. She really hates the music, but she finds it fun counting how many guys hit on her in just one night. She keeps a blog with the funniest pick-up sentences she is told every time she is out. Tonight there’s this guy that has been looking at her all night but hasn’t taken any step. She thinks he’s very cute and has something different. She can’t let him go, so she makes a move, to find that he’s Italian and that night is his last night in London. After that bar they go to a club and then they end up at hers. They really seem to connect, so they exchange numbers.

Stansted Airport, Saturday, 4^th January, 7am. Joanna’s Spanish flatmate has held a house party because some friends of hers from Barcelona are visiting. Joanna had felt chemistry with one of them. They are still staying until Tuesday, but she is going to Dublin for a few days to see her family. When everyone was too drunk to notice, they disappeared in her room. She finds it amazing that he has volunteered to go with her all the way to the airport, especially since her flatmate has told her that Catalan men are not particularly courteous. They kiss each other good-bye and promise to keep in touch.

Barcelona, Friday, 14^th February, 11pm. Pere is mad at Joanna. They’ve just known each other for a bit more than one month, but he had got so excited about her. All his friends have been advising him not to expect too much from her. They agree that she is gorgeous, intelligent and good fun, but you have always to be careful with long-distance things. He has been doing a lot of research in order to plan the coolest St. Valentine’s night she would ever have. He thinks Barcelona’s nightlife is at least as good as London’s, and with the night he had in mind she would be ultimately convinced of it. And all for nothing, because she hasn’t showed up. He has tried to call her many times, but her phone has been off all day. He tries to calm down and tells himself there must be a logical explanation for all this, but tonight he just can’t be rational. This sort of things makes him think of all the disappointments he’s had with other girls in the past, and he can feel nothing but frustration.

Rome, Friday, 14^th February, 10pm. Alessandro has been waiting for hours at the airport with the most beautiful bunch of red roses. Well, probably not the most beautiful, but to find a nice rose in Rome on St. Valentine’s is quite a challenge. The flowers are starting to wilt, the same as his spirits. There are no more flights coming from London tonight, and her phone is off. The most terrible things have started to cross his mind. Probably she has just realised she is too good for him. He honestly believes she is, and every minute he has spent with her he has been wondering how such an amazing girl could have picked a guy like him…

London, Monday, 13^th January, 2pm. Joanna is back to reality after some very crazy days. She tries to concentrate on her classes, but she keeps trying to put all the pieces together of what has happened and figure out what to do next. Isn’t it ironic?, she thinks. She hasn’t met any interesting guys for so many months and now there are two of them that she is really starting to fancy. And guess what, both of them are thousands of miles away! ‘You really hit the ground running this time, Joanna’, she tells herself. She has always had this soft spot for foreigners and this inconvenient tendency to fall for people who don’t live where she does. She is starting to be a bit fed up with this little nasty habit of hers…

Dublin, Friday, 25^th April, 10pm. Joanna has come home for the weekend. She has been doing it almost every week for the last two months. It really affected her, so she feels that going away from London chaos, even if it’s just for a couple of days, is helping her getting over it. She felt too embarrassed after having let both of them down that day to call giving explanations. None of them had got back in touch again. Some weeks later she had really been tempted to call them, but then she gave it a second thought and realised that maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Things happen for a reason, she thought. Probably she deserved what happened. She had never believed in karma before, but she hadn’t believed in magic either until that morning the week after meeting Pere, when she started her computer and found an shortcut on the desktop called ‘Person multiplier’. But that St. Valentine’s day she had got home from work extremely excited about the weekend ahead, only to find that the application had disappeared from her desktop. She searched for it all over the computer, but there was no trace of it. Vanished forever in the limbo of data. After that, she had to come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t handle two long-distance relationships at the same time. ‘I learned my lesson’, she tells herself. ‘Next time I will fall for someone who lives in the same place as I do’. Also, just in case, she upgraded her anti-virus so she didn’t get any more nasty wish-granter software.

Sakura

A man is celebrating his 80^th birthday. He watches an eight-year old girl play under the cherry tree in his garden. Sakura looks quite western (his dad is American), but still keeps the straight black hair and slanting eyes. She is wearing a white dress and a white petal falls on her lovely tiny nose. She rubs it, then looks up and waves at him. He smiles back, and recalls the day when he saw her grandmother for the first time.

He was ten and she was five. His father had taken him to the garden and pointed at the little girl that was playing under the white blooming cherry tree. She was the most precious creature he had ever seen. In her white dress, her whitest skin contrasting with her jet-black hair, he thought that was what angels must have looked like. He instantly fell in love with her and knew he would never love any other woman in his life.

She died some years ago, and he buried her under the cherry tree that he planted when they first arrived in London, to remind them of their native country. When they came they had nothing but one another and had to work really hard to get through.

Sakura is the flower of the cherry trees. For Japanese people, cherry trees blooming means spring has arrived. For him, after so many years, it still brings back memories of that innocent pure girl playing under the white petals as if anything else mattered.