9. The Line Drawing of Departure
When soft sunlight, drowsy with late afternoon memory, scattered vermillion dust—the way one scatters flowers at a beloved's funeral—that was when your moment of leaving drew near. The car waiting in the courtyard, restless with the engine's idle hum; this hurrying—it meant nothing, really. Pointless busyness, senseless ritual—the way people at a deathbed suddenly bustle about, compelled to do something, anything, because stillness is unbearable—yet everyone rushed about nonetheless.
Was there something to say? In what depth of the chest did that secret tremor hide, at what layer lay that surge of feeling, which wanted to break free from the lips but never did? What word reached the tip of the tongue only to turn back—no one knew, not even I. The car drove away—hurried, merciless in its speed, leaving a curtain of dust in its wake—and there remained only the echo of emptiness, the scent of vanishing dust before the face, and that evening sun dusted with vermillion—which was now merely the color of goodbye.
10. The Remnants of Dusk
I walk beside you—without touching; I feel the warmth of your body, yet I do not touch. I let the fragrant memory rising from your skin slip into the air's hands in the dimming light—let it drift, let it go wherever it will. Like the ankle bells of some enchantress from an ancient dance, the air brushes past me; I startle—wobble like a thorn floating in water, neither sinking nor swimming—suspended somewhere in between.
The idea of weariness seems as illusory as the air itself; flower pollen on the light breeze encircles my consciousness—the way mist slowly devours the street lamps—distance is erased, freedom dissolves. I look—from the bottomless depths of your eyes, gravity descends, the way meteors fall drawn by a planet's pull. This awareness of existence, held down by force—like a suppressed blow to the head—stays silent, accumulating in layers, wounds upon wounds.
11. The Myth of Repetition
The moment I bit into jelly-spread bread at the breakfast table—in this utterly domestic moment—I suddenly remembered some ancient sailor's brave voyage and the forgotten legend of a mythic bird, the way the smell of fire can jolt you awake from sleep. And strangely—in your face I always see an old portrait, as if two faces laid on transparent glass would slip one inside the other—exactly so. Since then, that ancient sailor and I, that portrait and you—two pairs of shadows, quite intimate with each other, quite inseparable.
The moment you got in the hired carriage, you said, raise the window. As I reached to raise it, your fake diamond earring at the street corner caught the shop's light and swelled like a bell—false diamonds hold light too, and that is life's jest. Tired as I was, I was thinking of the ocean—somewhere far away, I could hear the night bell of a lighthouse; I was getting caught in a net of thickening thoughts—caught, the way a spider traps itself in its own web.
12. An Uncommon Smile
She was not remarkable to look at—among thousands of girls on the street, you would not single her out. And yet the way she smiled—in that smile was the audacity of stepping beyond the cage of conventional life and standing outside it, a bright radiance of the fierce hunger to live—the way sunlight suddenly streams through a ruined house's window and transforms dust motes into gold.
In life's varied conflicts each day, the many currents of existence wish to converge at a single point—the way rivers fall into the sea, the way people of different paths meet on a temple's platform at a religious festival. When the time comes, one must kick convention aside; from the stagnant water of a blocked reservoir, one must break the dam and set it free. This undiscovered, parallel, innate dimension—this distinctive, spontaneous direction of the inner self—what name should I give it?
Suddenly—this discovery, this crossing over, this unexpected joy—all of it filled the girl's face with such radiant light, as if the moon were freed from eclipse.
13.
# Shelter in the Pine Forest
The small bungalow hidden among the rows of pine trees—where dreams become real, where mist itself writes poetry. We—a handful of us—navigated the winding mountain paths and finally stopped the car at the threshold of that refuge.
Around the wood fire, we were beggars of warmth, all our civilization’s masks set aside. Outside, nature was brewing mountain wine—in the mist, in the air, in the dew; in a tenderness soft as a girl’s first love, the little bungalow trembled too, the way birds huddle and shake on winter nights.
Rain came suddenly—countless streams of water through the fine needles of the pine forest. We few existed in their minds too—in the mind of the rain, of the mountain, of the mist. Though each of us was absorbed in our own destination—lost in our private caverns of thought—we all knew one thing, the way we know the sun will rise at dawn: this enchantment will not last, this shelter will dissolve the moment morning comes.
A sad night gazed down the source of a mountain girl’s laughter—gazed and gazed—the way people standing at a station stare at the empty tracks long after the train has vanished.
—
## 14. The Arithmetic of Burning
With the fierce grip of a tiger’s claw, an urgent interest in casting life anew in mold after mold—the way a sculptor hacks the same stone again and again into fresh figures, breaks them, begins again. Experience slowly transforms into language’s acute thirst—I search for words, find none, and suffocation comes from their absence. My inner self is full of restless dialogue—like the ocean fighting itself on a storm-torn night.
My failures laugh around me with theater-hall mockery—like audiences who rejoice in the hero’s fall. The ordinary rules I once despised, which I meant to trample underfoot—now they wind around me like a net; breath comes harder, like rope growing tight.
I cannot love—that is a lie; but in love, shadows lengthen. The deeper I descend, the more I find hidden traces of new selves, and the more afraid I grow of what’s ahead—again and again—the way each new discovery makes a scientist realize how little he truly knows.
—
## 15. The Speech of Spring’s Dwelling
A green tide, as if bringing the surge of youth—new leaves on every branch, grass carpeting the earth, the thick perfume of flowers in the air. I have carried and been carried by many cultures’ many currents—yet even within my sorrow, a tremor of joy awakens, like spring buds on a winter-naked tree. Above self-identity, far above the blood-red flame of the flame-of-the-forest, some unknown bird has made its nest—when you hear its call, the world seems new still, seems still its first dawn.
Rows of delicate dancers of thought sway and move—each gesture of their bodies a question mark. At their exuberant touch, youth’s sleeping stones are waking—the way, in ancient tales, a petrified maiden finds breath again at another’s touch—dams break, freedom spreads everywhere, within and without—where it is needed most.
—
## 16. The Ocean of Five Feet Three
Five feet three inches—that is her height; yet within that frame lies fathomless ocean depths—where light cannot reach, where strange creatures see without eyes. Her entire being is wrapped in some drowsy mist, a solitary hour that transcends the borders of towns, exists beyond maps.
She is really a strange flower—a blend of the rose’s softness and the jasmine’s wild fragrance; she doesn’t bloom in gardens, but blooms along roadsides, by her own will. Life’s wind leaves marks upon her—yet there is no dried flower pressed in the corner of any book, no thick binding of a philosopher’s worn tome holding her solid self captive. She is her own philosophy, her own explanation.
The neighborhood boys’ whistles, snatches of song, all the grime and waste of life and manhood—it all comes and goes like waves in recent indifference; it leaves no scar, makes no mark.
In the folds of her plain cloth lay hidden some secret—a heart nurtured by nature’s wealth, forever growing, inch by inch, like the delta of a river.
**17. The Architecture of Extinction**
My being—the moment you dissolved it into another’s, easily, effortlessly, the way salt dissolves in water—something within me began to die. Slowly, silently—as a rat dies inside a wall, and no one knows until the stench spreads. It was murder—and yet this murder leaves no blood, no screams; only a long, weary, endless void—like when mist clears on a winter dawn and the fields lie bare, empty of all presence.
Yet I have not stood before you in disguise. I have no stomach for false performance over what is lost; instead I stand here openly, with open wounds—wearing that curved, venomous smile of blood-stained lips from a hundred centuries past. My struggle to survive is a defeated, helpless effort—like bailing water from a sinking ship with a bucket.
**18. Philosophy of Waters**
On a moonlit night wrapped in pallid mist, the boat drifted slowly to the river’s heart. The entire world now resembled a piece of porcelain—dull, dusty, bereft of meaning; stone plates arranged upon white ornamentation—artificial, lifeless, as though ancient civilizations’ broken vessels arranged in a museum.
Surroundings willingly abandoned; even the stars rise as if compelled—weary with duty. A prison encircles the soul; whatever order existed, whatever union was—all has collapsed, just as an old house’s roof caves in one day. A temple spire is visible in the distance—fixed as in a painting, itself unaware of whose purpose it serves. In infinite emptiness, all things lose their meaning. Darkness dwells beneath the lamp; benevolence? Mere deception—do we even understand ourselves?
Yet in one boat, conversation persists—two passengers sit face to face. Union and separation, life’s addition and subtraction, journey, satisfaction, resentment—all drift across the water. Everything is image—everything, everything—trapped in frames, motionless, mute.