When Shall We Meet Again After the Clouds Part

After the clouds parted, ten years flowed by like water. — Epigraph

You have been on the road all along, meeting beauty, befriending kindred spirits who cherish it as you do, and talking freely with them. In the prime of youth, they radiate the same fervor of life as the summer when you met. Suddenly, a fallen leaf drifts to your side. You brush it gently, yet it opens an album—faded snapshots that ripple your heart, the ripples swelling into waves, and the waves blooming into strawflowers that play back the silhouettes of old times.

Fleeting Glimpses

Time blurs your past, yet fragments of old days linger in your mind. You remember the vintage TV of your childhood, the DVD player your father brought home, the old household items... You remember your hometown as a child, and you remember arriving in a strange land for the first time. Since then, those old things have transformed with the vicissitudes of time, fading from your memory.

But your hometown has never forgotten you. It calls to the fragments buried in your heart, and it makes you recall your past.

Performing the Self

You first recall your hometown—a bustling town hidden in the mountains. The bodhi tree at the street corner shelters the merchants, who rise with the sun and rest with its setting. This ancient bodhi once listened to your solitary opera, and to your sobs; every detail of your childhood, the bodhi has kept in memory. You had forgotten them, but whenever you write your own verses, you remember that distant past—a bodhi tree that once listened to your lofty opera. So you write more boldly, word by word, and you offer those words to the bodhi of your hometown, which still listens to your lonely opera and your weeping.

Like your hometown, you love the lonely tune. In that bustling town hidden in the mountains, the only road is its sole link to the outside world. The simple villagers sing a song unique to their small town. The town sings to the mountain stream, making it flourish; the town sings to the brook, making it more joyful. Yet in the end, no traveler from afar is willing to listen to its song. It performs its own solitary opera for the stream and the brook. The town of your hometown—you are like it, loving the solitary opera. These lonely tunes are the best performance of the self, and whenever you perform yourself, you always recall the hometown far away.

You cry out: "Hometown, call me by your name!"

Ripples on the Water

In the distance, a bonfire burns for those who have waited long. You left your homeland and drifted far away. You have thought of home, of the bodhi tree, of the wild grass and flowers. The paths of time are serene, but the depths of years are growth. You open the book of wandering and touch the old memories within; they warm you, and like flowing water, they soothe your wounds. When those flowers knock down the old memories, they will overflow for countless seasons.

Those overflowing flowers and old memories surge against your heart. You once dreamed of wielding a sword and roaming the world, of crossing mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas; you once paused for nameless lives, and buried withered blossoms; you once drifted far and wide, and let your loneliness run free.

Amid the fragments of wandering, you keep marveling at life. You wrote of sunflowers standing strong after a storm, of an ordinary seed breaking through soil and even rock to sprout and grow, of a stray cat's tenacious will to live, and of Qu Yuan's immortal legend bought with his life.

Youth chases time, and life ebbs with it. Your mother's hair, once supposed to be black, begins to gray; your grandmother grows slower; your brother steps into marriage. And your tears trace down cheeks that should be young but are gradually maturing. The old stories in those fragments become your own years. Through wind and rain, you always choose to chase, to howl at the storm, calling for it to rage harder and shatter the past you cannot bear to look back on. Yet when you gather the courage to look up, you realize those fading fragments have quietly made you grow.

Old memories are like a window—once pushed open, hard to close again. You stand in the moonlight, listening to the tide rise and fall, letting it wash over your heart, watching the moonlight spill across the harbor, leaving only vast emptiness. Those years intoxicate you—unbidden, unforgettable—yet you must still set sail.

Gently brush the dust off old memories. Those light, or heavy, recollections trace one footprint after another across your heart. Everything around you is quietly reborn; time is about to turn a new page. You bid farewell to old memories. Even as you keep asking the bright moon, "When shall we meet again, old friend?" you still set sail toward the distance, because you know that perhaps you will meet again there.

You are me, and I am you.