After parting with the floating clouds, ten years have passed like flowing water. — Inscription
You have always been on the road, encountering beauty, meeting a group of people who love beauty just like you, and talking freely with them. In their prime, they radiate the heat of life just like the summer when you met. Suddenly, a fallen leaf drifts beside you; you gently touch the leaf, but it opens an album, and the yellowed shadows make ripples in your heart lake, and the ripples stir up waves in your heart, which turn into clusters of blooming daisies, playing the silhouettes of old times.
Fleeting Shadows#
Time has blurred your past, but fragments of old times linger in your heart. You remember the old television from your childhood, the DVD player your father brought home, the old items in your house... You remember your hometown from childhood, and you also remember the first time you came to a strange place. Since then, those old things have changed dramatically with the passage of time, making you forget the past.
But your hometown has never forgotten you; it calls out to the fragments of your heart, making you recall your past.
Interpreting Myself#
You first recall your hometown, a bustling little town hidden in the mountains, where the bodhi tree at the corner shelters the merchants who work at sunrise and rest at sunset. This ancient bodhi has listened to your lonely operas and your sobs; it remembers every little detail of your childhood. You may have forgotten them, but whenever you write poetry and songs that belong solely to you, you will recall that distant past when a bodhi listened to your lofty opera, and thus you boldly write line by line, sending those words to the bodhi of your hometown, which still listens to your lonely opera and your sobs.
Like your hometown, you love the lonely tune. The bustling little town hidden in the mountains has only one road, the only connection to the outside world. The simple villagers here sing songs unique to their town, singing to the mountain stream, bringing it vitality; singing to the creek, making it even more joyful. But in the end, no traveler from afar is willing to listen to its songs; it performs its own lonely opera to the mountain stream and the creek. The little town of your hometown, like you, loves the lonely opera; each lonely tune is the best interpretation of oneself. Whenever you interpret yourself, you will always remember your distant hometown.
You shout: “Hometown, please call me by your name!”
Gentle Ripples#
In the distance, there is a bonfire burning for the long-awaited person. You leave your homeland and drift far away. You once thought of your hometown, thought of the bodhi, thought of the wild grass and wildflowers. The paths of time are serene and beautiful, but deep in the years is growth. You open the book of drifting, touching the old memories of drifting; they bring you warmth, and like flowing water, they soothe your pain. When the flowers collide with old memories, they will flood countless seasons.
Those flooding flowers and old memories impact your heart. You once dreamed of wandering the world with a sword, and you once dreamed of crossing mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas; you once paused for nameless lives and buried withered flowers; you once drifted far away with ease and let your loneliness flow freely.
In the fragments of drifting, you continuously express your admiration for life. You once wrote about sunflowers standing strong after a storm, wrote about an ordinary seed breaking through the soil and even rocks to sprout and grow, wrote about a stray cat's tenacious life, and wrote down the immortal legend that Qu Yuan exchanged for with his life.
Youth chases time, and life flows away with time. Your mother's hair, which should have been black, begins to turn gray, your grandmother becomes slower, your brother steps into the hall of marriage, and your tears, which should have been youthful, gradually flow down your maturing cheeks. Those old stories in the fragments turn into your years. No matter the wind and rain, you always choose to chase, to roar against the storm, calling for the storm to come more fiercely, shattering the unbearable past. But when you muster the courage to look back, you find that those gradually blurred fragments quietly let you grow.
Old memories are like a window; once opened, it is hard to close again. You are in the moonlight, listening to the sound of the tides rising and falling, letting them wash over your heart. Watching the moonlight spill onto the harbor, they leave only vastness. Those years make you intoxicated, lost in thought, yet unforgettable, but you still have to set sail.
Gently brush away the dust of old memories; those light or heavy memories leave footprints in your heart. Everything around you is quietly being reborn, time will open a new chapter, you bid farewell to old memories, even if you keep asking the bright moon: “When will I see my old friends again?” But you still set sail towards the distance because you know that perhaps your old friends will meet again in that faraway place.
You are me, and I am you.
This article is synchronized and updated to xLog by Mix Space. The original link is https://fmcf.cc/posts/life/When-Will-We-Meet-Again