It would be the last time I’d see Jack, since he didn’t have a return flight on his trip to Thailand. My flight to Thailand was in two days, so who knows when we’d meet again. The Cherry Blossom Crew had to get together for a last hurrah. We decided to go to Flip Out, a trampoline park with a foam cube pit. After 10 minutes of jumping, we were all exhausted and lazed in the sea of foam cubes. In Cherry Blossom Crew style, we decided to sabotage each other by throwing cubes and burying each other underneath them. One person would say, “Bury [name]!” and we’d all toss cubes at them until you could only see their arm sticking out from under the pile.

We spent most of our hour in the cube pit, but toward the end we decided to take midair photos. We posed for Danny’s camera as he took photo bursts of each member of the Cherry Blossom Crew. As someone who’s never had a good midair photo taken of her before, I was glad to get not one, but four!

Everyone had their shining moment… until we were kicked out because they were closing.

Then we got some pizza at a nearby street stall before heading to the shrimping place.

We paid for an hour, and with the admission we got a fishing rod, bait, and a mesh bag to put the shrimp into once we’d caught them. We sat along the side of a shallow pool dotted with a few other shrimp fishers. We hooked small krill onto the tiny hooks and cast them into the water. It was kind of difficult to put the krill on without breaking them.

The first one of us to catch one was Susan. Her floating bob went underwater, so she tugged up quickly and a huge, translucent prawn came flying out of the water. She swung it around and it writhed in the air, flicking water at all of us. No one knew what to do, since this was the very first catch of the night. She made Danny hold down the arms and legs, and unhook the shrimp from the rod. It was a major ordeal. But Susan had some kind of mystic shrimp calling because she caught another one almost immediately after that. The rest of us were starting to wonder if we were going to catch any at all. Not long after, Adriana caught one. And then I caught one. It was exhilarating to know that a giant crustacean was at the other end of my line. I brought it in and Danny held it down as I took the deep hook out of its neck.

The girls had caught everything up until this point in the night. Finally, Jack caught one, putting the guys on the board. Unlucky Danny caught none. That is, until the shrimp gods took pity on him and granted him two shrimp in the last five minutes of our time.

Still, the girls won out, five shrimp to four (Susan caught three and solidified the victory). The shrimp man took our basket to the back and grilled them up, covering the prawns in thick salt.

We dug into our plate full of prawns on a stick, steaming and juicy, trying to avoid the head, guts, and tomato-looking brain. Sadly, it was time to say goodbye. I feel like I’ll see Jack again down the road. I’m envisioning somewhere decorated with cherry blossoms. It wasn’t truly goodbye, just “see ya later.” The Cherry Blossom Crew is for life. And like it or not, we are all bonded by the pink flowers that bloom every spring. Our spirit lives in the Cherry Blossoms, renewed with the Earth.