In the beginning he remembered her as the girl in blue, hair blowing in the wind, a tuft of bangs all over her forehead. He didn't know her name, but he always remembered how much he liked watching her from afar.
One day she began wearing that red headband, he noticed immediately how her face lit up and it showed her wide forehead. Sakura was her name, Sakura-chan was what he would call her. It didn't take much for him to know she wasn't like anyone around - they were all too ordinary and they didn't have pink hair and green eyes; and if anyone asked what he thought, he would say she was pretty. No one did, but that didn't do anything to change his mind.
Time was kind, and she was still the same. She had grown her hair for a time and then suddenly decided to cut it short, yet she didn't look any less beautiful. Not very long after he found that he loved being taller, because he need only look ahead to see deeply into her jade green eyes, and sometimes when lucky, he was rewarded with a smile, warm enough to remind him why there was no other.
From then on they would go through many things and he would remember how it felt, and sometimes there were too many things, that he did not remember her at all. There were times he had to do things on his own, but often he wasn't at all surprised to find her there, just beside him. Those days he would no longer notice the length of her hair, the color of her eyes, or the beauty of her smile. The world was not that small and it didn't revolve around her, but when it stops, she was the first he wanted to see.
He stood a good distance from her, in a way that reminded him of the past. Only this time, their eyes met, and she looked back with eyes gleaming, a light blush on her cheeks, hair so neatly kept in a tight bun held up by those pins with dangling ornaments; lips pursed in modest wonder, and the seal that decorated her infamous billboard brow - what was and will always be his most favorite part of her face.
Indeed, time was kind, but he wasn't the same. No longer a child who knew nothing but to pull pranks, or to brag about his dreams in the hopes of catching her attention - no longer afraid that he wasn't enough. To him she will never be less than beautiful, and tonight she was going to hear it, straight from his lips.