Chapter 2 late flower

Autumn has come with the sound of falling leaves.Mornings are as fresh as dewdrops.The sky emits a soft light, clear and ethereal, making one want to hear the singing of a skylark flying high, just like looking at the blue sea and wanting to see a white sail. The setting sun is the wings of time. When it flies away, it unfolds extremely gorgeously for a moment.So dusk.So sadly yet peacefully I enjoyed many evenings in an arm-chair, in the street, or in a deserted garden.Yes, now I sit on a stone in the deserted garden, bathed in a blue mist, and gradually feel the weight of old age. It was a moonless first night.There are no tourists.There is no long cry of crickets in the decaying grass.I can't remember how I got into such a realm.My pair of withered hands rested on the staff, and my head leaned on the back of the hands, as if listening to the darkness, waiting for an unknown fate to appear in this silence.There is a wooden bridge a few steps to the right.The water under the bridge has already dried up.Across the creek that has lost its sound is a forest of weeping willows. No one can describe that trace of green in the colors of the night, and I looked at them blankly.My thoughts drifted in the gloom floating like boundless waves.A combination of reality and fantasy of a memory: the summer night with golden fireflies flying; the cool fragrance of lotus and the strong aroma of grass and leaves make the lakeside a cold tropical place; the breeze blows through the reeds ; The shade of the tree is like an umbrella.The timidity and shyness were hidden under the raindrops of moonlight, ... but suddenly these disappeared.My thoughts gathered from the boundless darkness and questioned myself.

What am I thinking about?Remember a lost garden of the past?Or is it fabricating some past prosperity for this desolate place, like a mythical figure who used the sound of the Layak qin to drive the stubborn stones to jump up and build the city of Zapi?While I was thinking quietly and closing my eyes, a strange coincidence happened. In the grove of willows drowned by the still deeper night, I heard two ghosts or old men approaching with soft footsteps to a swimming chair, sat down, and, with a soft sigh, began to A weak but intelligible conversation: ─ I have been expecting you.When I sat in front of the window with my head bowed in the evening, or stretched out my arms in the middle of the night and touched the coldness of old age, I had a premonition that you were coming back.

──You have a premonition? ──Yes.Don't you feel the same way? ──I have a constant tendency to run back into your arms.On any day in these twenty years, as long as you call and order.But you don't.Only now have I bravely broken your promise and returned without your promise, and found that you have long been expecting me. ──Don't tell me it's too late.You smile more gently now. ──My saddest thing is that I don't know how you spent these long twenty years. --with a bleak joy.Because when I think that you are blessing my every day, I feel that it is not unbearable.But lately I've been depressed.The ancients said that when a bird is about to die, its song is also sad, as if I have a big regret for life; I will never get the final peace until I have no remedy. ──So you had a premonition that I was coming back?

──Yes.Not only did I have a premonition of your coming back now, but after we first met and gradually became close to each other twenty years ago, I was haunted by a kind of prophecy of my own, like an ominous shadow. ──You didn't tell me then. ──I don't want to upset you as much as I do. ──I noticed your uneasiness then. ──But I strictly forbid my own divulging.I feel that all the heavy things should be borne by me alone - now we can talk like a story. ──Yes, now we can talk about ourselves as we talk about the characters in the story.But what a story that touched us at the very beginning. When we were not very acquainted, one March night, I came back from a solitary outing, walked into my room with lonely joy and tiredness, and opened I found a bunch of brightly blooming yellow forsythia flowers on my desk and a piece of white paper with your kind words written on it.I think of your timid hand with reverent gratitude.I keep it on the windowsill with a bottle of clean water.I used to regard myself as a bystander, quietly watching a girl turn upside down for love, waiting for the story to unfold naturally, but this unexpected interlude disturbed me very much, and I slept very badly that night .

──And I remember that you went out early the next morning and didn't come back until dusk, with a strange smile on your face. ──Until now you don't know how I spent that day.It was a kind of panic, a panic that could not be refused to the intrusion of love.I spent the morning at a friend's house.I sat in his room talking eloquently about many issues, looking at a famous painting on the wall, a three-masted ship was about to sink in the blue waves.I feel I am the boat, and my arms and piteous cries are in vain.When it was almost noon, I resolutely walked out of the friend's house.Went into my lunch alone in a street restaurant.

Then he walked far away to a forest in the outskirts.In the woods I walked, lay and walked, and as the afternoon passed, I made up a story for myself.I imagined that there was a hut in an uninhabited barren mountain and deep forest, and there lived a fairy who was relegated for breaking the law of God.When she left heaven, the God of prophecy told her that after some years a young god would pass by the path in front of her hut; if she could keep him with a seductive song, she would be saved.Several years have passed.One evening, she was leaning against the window, and for the first time heard the footsteps that made her tremble, and she sang excitedly.But the proud footsteps scrambled forward for a moment, and disappeared into the darkness. ──Is this the prophecy you told yourself?Why was the young god not left behind? ──If he is left behind, he will lose his eternal youth.Just like that bunch of forsythia flowers, when they are placed in my vase, they become the flowers that are most likely to wither, and after a few days, they will fall to the ground like some golden footprints. ──Do you still believe in eternal youth?

──Now I know that people who have lost their youth are more gentle. ──Because people are exaggerated when they are young? ──Exaggerated and cruel. ──But it is not to be blamed. ──Yes, we do not blame youth... Listening to the whispers of this weak ghost until this loud name, youth, like an echo, pervades the air, like the beautiful mountain forest that is obsessed with Narsso The goddess haggarded because she couldn't get the return of love, and turned into a sound. Only then did I open my eyes from the fossil-like meditation and raised my head.There is boundless silence all around.Not a breath of wind blows among the leaves.The crescent moon is like a half-circle golden ring, and stars like small white flowers are embedded in the dark blue sky.I feel a little cold.The stone on which I sit has grown dew.So I got up and leaned on my cane to go back to my lonely apartment.And the pair of whisperers I was eavesdropping just now are not ghosts or reunited partners, but two characters in a four-act play that I conceived for a long time but never finished twenty years ago.At that time I thought they were elusive to describe, but suddenly appeared in such a lonely night in the deserted garden, because looking at the warm sunlight on the wall this afternoon, I remembered a long time ago In autumn, I opened one of my old favorite books and read, and suddenly I returned to the tenderness and sentimentality of nineteen years old, when I found a section written on yellowing paper in this way. A short poem starting with two lines: I found my childhood dream in your eyes, as I found late flowers in an autumn garden...May 1935