We Fall In Love In The Wind

We fell in love in the wind,

Because I am a bird

With one wing.

Time is Not a River (Prose)

People always tell me that time is a river. It is continuous and unstoppable, and no matter what comes into its path, the river simply carries it or flows across it. Yet, I think my time is not so simple. It is more like my hair. It never stops growing, but when it grows too long, it starts to split and wither like flowers, and I will have to cut it and its era will come to an end. I can look back at photos of myself in different hairstyles, but there is a gap between them and me. We are not part of the same river, they are no longer part of my present time.

That is, to say, I don’t believe my time is linear. I never feel time as a line that can be measured by a ruler. I feel my present more as an edge that keeps chasing me. When I try to be aware of that edge, it feels as if it is moving so slowly and will never catch me. Yet when I lose my awareness, the edge will suddenly rush to me and engulf everything like a starving lion.

I always see a man sitting in the cafe with his golden retriever on my way to school, and the golden retriever wave its tail to me every time it sees me. When I think its shimmering fur and smile now, I feel connected to it from a first-person-point-of-view kind of way. I know I will see it again sometime this week when I go to school like I always have, and it feels as if this will continue for a very long time. Yet perhaps, there will be one day when the dog and its owner stop coming to this cafe. Then, this tiny instance of my life will fade without my notice. When I realize the fact that they are no longer part of my life, they will have already been long gone. And, while I logically recognize the existence of this day, I find it almost impossible to emotionally imagine it. And there are bigger things in life that will eventually fall from my edge beyond my imagination.

Countless things in my life have fallen from the edge. Most are unnoticeable when they fall. It’s like boiling a frog with warm water that gradually heats up—the frog (me) doesn’t feel the change until it becomes futile to feel the change. When a spring melted into summer without my notice, that spring and everything I did during it fell from my edge. When a new school year starts and I no longer see some familiar faces in the hallway, my previous school year and the people who graduated or transferred fell from my edge. When I graduated from high school and came to New York, part of my root in my hometown fell from my edge. Once in a while, I feel like so many subtle things that together constitute my identity have fallen from the edge that I have fallen from that edge myself. Then, a new version of me would substitute the older version of me and inherit her memories and consciousness, thinking that they are the same person when they are, in fact, almost strangers.

The world beneath my edge are what we call memories, a completely different approach of time—past tense. When I look at them, there is almost a screen between us, and it makes me feel as if I am watching someone’s movie from a first person point of view. Memories haunt me at random times about what have left me—time with certain friends, love towards a certain food, the ability to feel happy about simple little things…Yet when I feel stifled by loss and nostalgia and try to look for the traces of their existence and connection with the present me, I never manage to do so.

My childhood friends, like myself, have grown into adults who are strangers to their little selves. My childhood runaway places, like myself, have changed into places I would barely recognize. When I eat my favorite childhood snack now, it doesn’t taste as good as it does in my memories. When I try to cheer myself up with little cute things in life, I find myself numb and untouched.

The world and its inhabitants are four-dimensional. Their past falls from their edges just like mine. Yet when things fall, they don’t simply disappear. They turn into stories that make us suddenly want to cry when we walk past a street that reminds us of something distant yet familiar. We know that we can’t catch it again, we know it is gone, and we know that even with these realizations, we will do everything to inhale and savor that little hint of familiarity of the past.

Time is not a river, time is a besieged fortress (just like the title of Qian Zhongshu’s satirical novel). We always long for what’s on the other side of the wall, and we never realize that our “now” is going to fall from the edge at some point in time just like our past. When we do realize that something has become the past, we are already on the other side of the edge, and we fill ourselves with nostalgia and discontent of the present until that present becomes the much cherished past again…