If she felt stressed, marketplaces, especially open air ones, she a coworker of mine told me, would be the ideal cure for what she described as undesirable loneliness. She likes to walk in the open air marketplaces that was sort of the ‘birth place’ of her childhood memory, and it had in some ways shaped her way of living in her early twenties. When people were around, life cures itself, strengthening our resilience.
At times when people talking and walking, she could finally feel relieved. It’s not a place for me, my place for relieving is remaining unclear. Skimming over the ocean, I stood up on the beach of Zhoushan where the pier is always busy for seafood trading and the boats moored in the harbor are waiting for a sailing to fish, I was fifteen, roaming along the beach where I had swam with a younger cousin. There bottled water sold then was charging for 10 renminbi- a special price fared for visitors only even though we had better buy some and without the water vendor, we wouldn’t have been able to survive the thirsty. To seek the light of life, I can’t feel much. Sometimes not much is too much. I can’t stop thinking about the sour of life. Without money and power, our daily routines could turn to a fast draining boat. I was speechless in the circumstance of continuing fighting for a way of being that I had always been speechless. There was A song line I’ve heard that goes “my mother said to me: “Don’t stop imaging. The day you do is the day you die.” I had been touched though I barely admit it. I’ve once stopped imaging the possibility of my life, fortunately, I regained the ability of reconstructing and reimagining the future I had envisioned fondly again, which is, to walk with somebody else along the beaches where the weather is tame. I have in no way no intention to hide my fear of the possibility that the future reunion between me and the person I met in Hankou and I walked with along the Donghu Lake of Wuhan might look hard to come true, for many complicated reasons. But looking forward, I still wanted to find you and to be surrounded by nothing but taming sunshine that we felt familiar.
It’s been like living in an island separated from the mainland by a gap too deep to cross when you and I have not contacted each other for years since 2019. And I still do recall and remember you fondly when your smiles, though forced ones, framed in the photos I took emerged again before my eyes. And tears of mine welled up for I knew every time when I thought of the letter L which is the initial letter of you surname in Chinese, I thought of you. You say your surname in English is Dragon because it is the English corresponding of the Chinese word Long. But there was a discrepancy between the meanings of the two. And I knew you certain knew this. It’s a compromise.
