Sometimes We Are the Only Ones With the Power to Make Our Fantasies Come True

Blossom rain on a summer's day.

I distinctly remember being a child staring out of my bedroom window, watching the blossom trees on the small patch of green between the buildings of our council estate.

I remember wishing I could go down and lie under them as they showered me in soft barely pink petals as the breeze played with my hair. I fantasied about a garden of our own, and a house with stairs, as I sat in my window and imagined myself a Rapunzel trapped in a tower to which she didn’t belong.

Hundreds of miles and decades away, I’m back in the window, dreaming of a house with stairs. I still have the childish notion that a house isn’t a real house without an upstairs, and living in a bungalow has allowed an idea that we’re just passing through to invade the ground beneath us, preventing roots from growing too deep.

Yet here in the window I smile because the air is filled with raining white against a pure blue sky. The blossom tree cut back to almost nothing by landlords who will never see its beauty, has thrived against the odds for another year. The buds like teasing hints for weeks and then an explosion of soft delicate flowers. Miniature clouds clinging to branches, holding on for dear life against the spring winds.

Confetti, my youngest calls it, as she dances beneath the tree's limbs. They are two bodies swaying together yet never touching. Not until the petals begin to fall like nature's blessings upon her hair.

I watch her and remember me. The moments I imagined, she is living and my heart expands with the sigh of contentment that fills my chest. The pruning shears are heavy in my hand as I let the blind fall and move back from the window. I have the blossom I have loved for so long and I know that soon the house will come. Today I step closer to that fantasy by moving with deliberate steps.

My hands caress the trunk of the tree noticing the ridges pushing against my fingertips, the branch I want yields easily as though eager for this new adventure.

‘Why did you cut it?’ her upturned face questions.

“Because this one will grow beside you and travel with us when we go.’ I reply.

The thing about fantasies is they can stay forever in the secret folds of your imagination if you let them. Sometimes that’s comforting and safe from the harshness of the real world, but other times the need to lay under a blossom rain on a cloudless day is greater.

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