Bouquet

Whenever the melody of Hanataba finds me, it raises a particular tide of feeling: blue sky, clear water, mountains, fields, a mind moving with the surface of the sea. I try to cast it off and immediately regret the attempt.

Everything moves farther away. Its traces blur until the dust settles. Memory is a worn cassette that cannot survive endless replay. Each impulse to listen again is an attempt to keep it intact a little longer, though it will disappear all the same.

Is love also a bouquet, with a season and an expiration date? A song carrying a memory is nothing unusual. One still reflects a friendship from middle school; others hold the rings of my high-school years. Each was planted somewhere in the mind, then gradually worn down by being heard again and again.

For a long time I collected fragments of time and returned to the smoke of the past. I wanted to recover the path that made me and understand how it produced the person I had become. Most of that effort was futile. A more workable method was to let music move the emotion, then let the emotion put something back into language: a sentence, a line, even the remains of a wall.

I looked back repeatedly, wrote the same thoughts and the same poems, and watched them lose their taste. The failure was foreseeable; perhaps it had already happened. After promising not to turn around, why keep retelling those years?

The writing grows old as I do. I am no longer as young, nor capable of exactly the same feeling. The more I have seen and learned, the more the view fills with flowers while the eyes themselves grow dry. I think of Algernon near the end, struggling to escape the maze.

To be full of feeling, tearful and bright-eyed; to have watched the flowers fall and seen through the mortal world: these phrases live more easily in literature. It is the mud of reality that actually covers a face with dust.

I have tried to look through candlelight toward halls behind red walls, and beyond city gates toward the sound of weapons. The real gate is difficult to cross. When ordinary frustration removes hope, the mind reaches for gods, spirits, and Zhuangzi's dream.

I do not believe in Buddhism, but I long for a meeting of minds. I believe in interior feeling and continue to look for explanation and meaning. Perhaps that too is a kind of private idol.

I have too little experience to offer a sage's truth. Much of this is only the old effort to force sorrow into a new lyric, a noisy performance staged for oneself. All appearances are illusory; made things pass like dreams and bubbles. Growing old before one's time may be nothing more than a costume borrowed from a storyteller.

Then where, exactly, is the heart trying to go?

I contacted old friends and met new ones. The past became something to laugh about: the old years are far away; now we smile at how the world has changed, as if it were a dream. We raised glasses and spoke warmly, but even that consumed something. After sleep, who remembers what was said the day before?

Idle words can be forgotten. Can I forget the people themselves: those who shaped me and shaped the memory, those who died inside recollection or disappeared into yesterday? From a distance they become definitions and summaries. The jade rubbed smooth loses its details. The unfamiliar city has no visible edge.

The yellowing bouquet is for Algernon.

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Originally published at Fengqing Inn. This version includes only light copy editing.