Autumn comes with the sound of fallen leaves. Morning is as fresh as dew. The sky emits soft light, clear and ethereal, which makes people want to hear the singing of a soaring lark, just like looking at the blue sea and seeing a white sail. Sunset is the wings of time. When it flies away, it will spread out for a while. So dusk. So I enjoyed many evenings in an armchair, in the street, or in a deserted garden, sadly and quietly. Yes, now I am sitting on a stone in a deserted garden, bathed in blue fog, and gradually feel the heaviness of old age. This is the first night without moonlight. No tourists. There are no crickets singing on the rotten grass. I don't remember how I got into this state. My withered hands rested on the staff and my head rested on the back of my hand, as if listening to the darkness, waiting for the unknown fate to appear in this silence. There is a wooden bridge a few steps to the right. The running water under the bridge has dried up. Crossing this silent stream, there is a weeping willow forest. No one can find traces of green in the color of this night, and I look at them blankly. My thoughts are like endless waves floating in the dark. A mixture of memory reality and fantasy: a summer night when golden fireflies fly; The cool fragrance of lotus and the rich fragrance of grass and leaves make the lake a tropical zone in cold regions; The breeze blows through the reeds; The shade of the tree was covered like an umbrella. Under the moonlight rain, I covered up my timidity and shyness, … but suddenly all this disappeared. My thoughts gathered from the boundless darkness and asked myself. What the hell was I thinking? Remember a lost garden in the past? Or are you inventing some past prosperity for this desolate place, just like a mythical figure who uses a lyre to drive stubborn stones to jump up and build the city of Bibi? When I closed my eyes and thought quietly, a strange coupling happened. In the willow forest submerged by the deeper night, I heard two ghosts or old people walk softly to a walking chair and sit down. In addition, after a sigh, they started a low but recognizable conversation:
I have been looking forward to you for a long time. When I sit by the window with my head down at dusk, or stretch out my arms at night and touch the cold of old age, I have a hunch that you will come back.
-You have a hunch?
-Yes. Don't you feel the same way?
I tend to return to your arms. Any day in these 20 years, as long as you make a phone call and give an order. But you didn't. Until now, I bravely broke your promise, came back without your promise, and found that you had been expecting me for a long time.
-Don't say it's too late. You smile more gently now.
What saddens me most is that I don't know how you spent these long twenty years.
-With sad joy. Because when I think that you bless me every day, I feel that it is not unbearable. But I've been depressed recently. As the ancients said, birds are gone, and their songs are sad, as if I have a great regret for life; I can't get the final peace until I fix it.
-So you had a hunch that I would come back?
-Yes. Not only are you back now, but I also have a hunch that after we met for the first time and got closer twenty years ago, I was entangled in my own predictions, like an unlucky shadow.
-You didn't tell me at that time.
I don't want you to be as sad as I am.
I noticed your anxiety.
-But I strictly forbid myself to reveal it. I think all the heavy things should be borne by me alone.
Now you can tell it like a story.
Yes, now we can talk about ourselves like characters in the story. But at first, it was a story that touched us. When we were not very familiar, one March night, I came back from a lonely outing, walked into my room with lonely joy and fatigue, turned on the light, and found a bunch of 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 hands with sincere gratitude. I provided it on the windowsill with a bottle of water. I once regarded myself as a bystander, quietly watching a girl turn upside down for love, waiting for the story to unfold naturally, but this unexpected interruption made me very uneasy. I didn't sleep well that night.
? And I remember you went out early the next morning and didn't come back until dusk, with a strange smile.
Until now, you still don't know how I spent that day. It was a panic, a panic that could not be refused because of the intrusion of love. I went to a friend's house for the whole morning. I sat in his room, talked a lot of questions and looked at a famous painting on the wall. A three-masted ship is about to sink in the blue waves. I felt that I was the boat. I spread my arms for help and whined in vain. Towards noon, I resolutely walked out of my friend's house. I had lunch alone in a street restaurant. Then go to a forest far away in the suburbs. I was walking, lying and walking in that forest. Afternoon passed and I made up a story for myself. I imagine that there is a small house in a deserted barren mountain and deep in the forest, where a fairy who has been demoted for breaking God's law lives. When she left the kingdom of heaven, the god of prophecy told her that a young god would walk on the path in front of her hut in a few years; If she can keep him with charming singing, she will be saved. A few years have passed. One evening, she leaned against the window and heard footsteps that made her tremble for the first time, which made her sing excitedly. But the footsteps of pride lingered for a while, then rang and disappeared in the darkness.
-Is that what you said to yourself? Why isn't the young god left behind?
If he is left behind, he will lose his eternal youth. Just like that bunch of forsythia flowers, they became the most easily withered flowers when inserted in my bottle, and fell to the ground like some golden footprints a few days later.
Do you still believe in eternal youth?
Now I know that people without youth will be more gentle.
Because people exaggerate when they are young?
-exaggerated and cruel.
-But it's not the culprit.
Yes, we don't blame young people. ...
Listening to the whisper of this weak ghost, I didn't open my eyes until this resounding name, youth, lingered in the air like an echo, like a beautiful mountain god obsessed with Nalsuo, haggard because he couldn't get love in return, and turned into a voice, and looked up from the stone chair. There was a dead silence all around. There is not a breeze blowing among the leaves. The crescent moon is like a half-circle gold ring, and the stars are like small white flowers embedded in the deep blue sky. I feel a little cold. The stone on which I am sitting has given birth to cold dew. So I stood up on crutches and prepared to go back to my lonely apartment. And the whispers I overheard just now were not ghosts or companions who met in the twilight, but two characters in a four-act drama that I had conceived for a long time but failed to complete twenty years ago. I found it difficult to describe them at that time. On such a lonely night, in a deserted garden, it suddenly appeared. Because I looked at the warm brass sunshine on the wall this afternoon, I remembered an autumn long, long ago. I opened a book I used to like and began to read. Suddenly, I was as tender and sentimental as when I was nineteen. When I found a short poem written on yellow paper, it began with two lines like this:
I found my childhood dream in your eyes,
If you find withered flowers in the autumn garden. ...