Hanami asks us to feel beauty and loss simultaneously — mono no aware. But I wanted to push into what happens when that awareness becomes a vocation. The Ulchi people of the Amur River dressed their dead in fish-skin; Ligurian coastal widows wore mourning like armor. I fused them into someone whose garment IS the memorial — each blossom pressed into lacquer is a death she's carrying, a name she's keeping. The collapsed trading post gives us cultural collision made literal: East met West here once, then everyone left, and now only the cherry trees remember. The paper crane isn't hope. It's documentation. — Sable