Tracing Back To You

One Shot Story

The year was 2011.

The setting was a dusty, sun-drenched backyard in a quiet suburban pocket of San Juan.

Twelve-year-old Justin de Dios didn’t play basketball like the other boys. While the neighborhood echoed with the rhythmic thump-thump of a ball, Justin was usually found crouched in the dirt, a magnifying glass in one hand and a sketchbook in the other. He wasn’t looking at bugs; he was looking at the way the grass grew between the cracks in the pavement.

"Justin! Look!"

You would burst through the gate, your knees scraped from climbing the Santol tree, holding a handful of crushed wildflowers. "I found these by the creek. They look like tiny stars. Can you draw them?"

Justin would look up, his eyes widening behind his glasses. He would make room for you on the grass, his shoulder brushing yours. "Those are Stellaria media," he’d say, his voice already possessing that quiet, studious calm. "But 'stars' is a better name."

He would spend hours sketching the flowers you brought him. In return, you would help him build "cities" out of popsicle sticks and mud, marveling at how he could make a structure stand perfectly level even on uneven ground.

"When we grow up," you said one afternoon, lying on your backs staring at the clouds, "I'm going to have a giant garden. And you’re going to build me a house right in the middle of it."

Justin turned his head to look at you, his expression serious. "I promise. A house with glass walls so you can see the flowers even when it rains."

--

Promises made at twelve are rarely kept.

Life pulled you apart with the brutal efficiency of a sudden storm. Justin’s father got a job offer in Canada, and within a month, the backyard was empty. There were letters at first—long, detailed descriptions of the "cold, grey architecture" of Toronto. Then there were emails. Then, eventually, there was only the silence of social media "likes" that grew further and further apart.

Justin became the star architect, the man who turned steel into poetry.

You became the florist, the woman who turned dirt into art.

Fifteen years passed. The boy with the magnifying glass became a ghost in your memory, a bittersweet "what if" tucked between the pages of an old school yearbook.

--

The night it happened, it was raining—that heavy, relentless Manila rain that turned the streets into rivers.

You were closing Bloom & Bone, your small sanctuary in Quezon City. You were exhausted, your back aching from lifting crates of hydrangeas. The shop was a mess of stems and discarded ribbons.

The bell chimed.

"We're closed," you said, not looking up from the register. "Unless you need a funeral wreath, and even then, you'll have to wait until tomorrow."

"I’m looking for someone who used to call Stellaria media 'tiny stars.'"

The voice was low, melodic, and carried a faint, polished accent you didn't recognize—but the cadence was unmistakable.

You froze. Your heart did a slow, painful somersault in your chest. You looked up, and for a moment, the fifteen years simply vanished.

The man standing in the doorway was tall, dressed in a sharp, charcoal-colored coat that looked far too expensive for this neighborhood.

His hair was styled, his face more angular, more mature—but his eyes were the same. They were still the eyes of the boy who looked at the world as if it were a puzzle he was trying to solve.

"Justin?" your voice was a mere whisper.

He stepped into the warm, amber light of the shop, his gaze scanning the shelves of ferns and the buckets of roses. A slow, lopsided smile broke across his face—the same grin that used to reassure you when you fell off the Santol tree.

"I’m fifteen years late," he said softly. "Is the offer for the house in the garden still open?"

--

You didn't know whether to hug him or throw a flowerpot at him. You ended up doing neither, instead leading him to the small vintage sofa in the corner.

He looked entirely out of place—a high-end architect surrounded by buckets of mud and moss—yet he looked more at home than you’d ever seen him in his social media photos.

"I saw the sign from the street," Justin explained, his fingers tracing the edge of his tea mug. "I moved back three months ago to head the De Dios firm here. I’ve been looking for this shop for weeks. I remembered you wanted to call it 'Bloom & Bone' in one of your old emails."

"You remembered that?" you asked, stunned.

"I remember everything," he said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, battered sketchbook. It wasn't his current professional portfolio. It was a thin, spiral-bound book with yellowed pages.

He opened it. There, on the first page, was a pencil sketch of a twelve-year-old girl with a smudge of dirt on her nose and a handful of wildflowers.

"I carried this to every site visit in Vancouver, Dubai, and Singapore," Justin confessed.

"Whenever a building felt too cold, I’d look at your 'stars' to remind myself why I started building in the first place."

--

Over the next few weeks, the "reunion" turned into a revolution.

Justin began stopping by the shop every evening after he left the firm. He would trade his Italian leather shoes for sneakers and help you haul bags of soil. In return, you would sit with him while he worked on his latest project—the "Legacy Library."

"It’s too rigid," he complained one night, staring at his tablet. "It’s all math, Airi. There's no oxygen in it."

"That’s because you’re still building boxes, Justin," you said, stepping behind him. You reached over his shoulder, your fingers guiding his stylus. "Nature doesn't use 90° angles. Look at the way a Protea grows. It’s structural, but it’s a curve. It’s a fortress, but it’s soft."

He leaned back, his head nearly touching your shoulder. "Show me."

For the rest of the night, the architect and the florist merged their worlds. You taught him about the Fibonacci sequence in sunflowers; he showed you how that same sequence could support a glass dome without a single pillar.

The air in the shop changed. It wasn't just the scent of lilies anymore; it was the electricity of two people rediscovering a connection that time had failed to sever.

Three months later, the De Dios firm held a private unveiling for the library's final design. The elite of Manila’s design world were there, whispering about Justin’s "radical shift" toward organic architecture.

Justin stood at the podium, looking every bit at the global success. But his eyes were searching the crowd until they found yours.

"This project," he told the room, "wasn't designed by an architect alone. It was designed by a promise made fifteen years ago in a backyard in San Juan. It was designed by the person who taught me that a building is just a skeleton—it needs a soul to breathe."

After the applause, he found you in the garden of the firm’s courtyard.

"I have something to show you," he said, taking your hand.

He led you to his private office. On his desk wasn't a blueprint for a skyscraper. It was a small, hand-built model of a house. It was circular, made of glass and pale wood, designed to sit perfectly in the center of a lush, wild garden.

"I haven't built it yet," Justin whispered, stepping into your space, his hand coming up to rest on your waist. "Because I needed to know if the gardener was ready to move in."

You looked at the model, then up at the boy—the man—who had never stopped drawing your stars.

"Is there room for a Santol tree?" you asked, your eyes blurring with tears.

Justin laughed, a warm, bright sound that filled the room. He leaned down, his forehead resting against yours. "I already cleared the space in the blueprints."

When he kissed you, it wasn't a sudden, frantic thing. It felt like the closing of a circle—a 360° curve that defied every straight line he had ever drawn. It felt like coming home.

--

The house was finished a year later.

It sat in the middle of a sprawling meadow, just like he promised. The walls were glass, and when it rained, you could sit in the living room and watch the water dance on the leaves outside.

Justin still drew every day. But now, his sketches weren't just of buildings. They were of you, pruning the roses, or the way the morning light hit the Blue Eryngium on the kitchen table.

Fifteen years was a long time to wait, but as Justin often said while he watched you work in the garden: "A good structure takes time to settle. But once the foundation is right, it can weather any storm."

You didn't just have a garden. And he didn't just have his architecture. Together, you had the Bloom and the Bone—the beauty of the moment and the strength of a promise that refused to die.