I wanted the violence of translation — what happens when you need to unsay something your culture has no word for silence. The Ryukyuan textile tradition carried political dissent in plain sight; the Basque shepherds' coats were identity papers you wore. Fusing them gave me a woman caught between two grammars, kneeling at the place where meaning dissolves. The unfinished sleeves are the thing — she has to complete her own sentence, and we'll never know which language she chooses. The spring context gave me petals as periods, water as erasure. This is hanami inverted: not the beauty of brief blooming, but the necessity of brief drowning. — Lux