If you’re reading this, it’s too late. They’re long gone.

Every year I’ve missed out on the cherry blossoms at High Park. Though the flowers are beautiful, they’re not in bloom for very long. And by not very long I mean 1 week of the entire goddamn year.

So when I heard they were blooming, I went into hyper-stalking mode on the High Park website, checking for daily updates on the status of the trees.

It just so happened that these exquisite, gorgeous flowers were blooming at a time that was highly inconvenient for me. Here’s why.

1) Due to our shitastic winter and abysmally delayed spring, the flowers bloomed late this year. So the perfect time to see them would be the May 17-18 weekend, when I’d be away in Boston (I know I know, life is excruciating)

2) Pressing work deadlines to finish by Thursday. Yay for advertising!

3) Need to pack for Boston (see #2 re: life being excruciating)

4) The ever-erratic Weather Network predictions were calling for a 30% chance of rain on Wednesday, and 80% chance on Thursday

5) Did I mention that the cherry blossoms are only in bloom for 1 friggin’ week?? Nah that’s cool Mother Nature, we’ll all just work our schedules around you.

So on Wednesday I left the office at 5:10, took work home, hedged my bets on the Weather Network being wrong, whipped up dinner and bolted for High Park.

Irrelevant food tangent:

Okay so this blog post is so not about food, but check out the super fast omelette I made.

Seriously, EGGS, AVOCADO AND GOAT CHEESE ARE THE TRIFECTA OF AMAZINGNESS. Tangent over.

So, apparently it’s possible for the Weather Network to be right. And apparently 30% chance of rain can mean 300% percent chance of rain. It POURED. The puddles in my shoes made squishy sounds when I walked, and my jeans transformed into a dark wash variety alarmingly quickly.

So I have a load of pics that look like this:

Breathtaking, amirite?

I also managed to snag a few of these that made it all worthwhile:

I realized that each flower on its own looks just… okay. But together, they’re surreal. Walking down the path and seeing them all felt magical, as though I was in a wet, uncomfortable fairytale.

As I walked down the path, I saw others with SLR cameras and their hoods up. We smiled at each other sheepishly. All around us, the wind was blowing the pink petals off the branches. It was quite beautiful, but sad. These flowers had so little time to live, and yet they were being ruthlessly ripped from the trees.

It sucks that we can’t admire these flowers all year round. It does. But we are given one blessed week to love them intensely, in a burst of passionate, desperate adoration. The truth is that if they were always around I might have never felt the need to go see them; there’s a sense of urgency to seek their beauty while you can.

Well played, Mother Nature.