Scattered Chapters of Youth

Fragments of Youth

Author: Qiu Yingying

Introduction

This is a love letter to the passing years, its ink steeped in morning dew and evening haze, its pages holding the song of cicadas and the sound of the tide. Youth is a letter with no stamp, sent to an unknown destination; a book of poems soaked by rain, its words bleeding into a blurred rainbow. With the passing of the seasons as its warp and the rise and fall of emotion as its weft, the book weaves a brocade shimmering with light. The unspoken stirrings, the bitterness swallowed alone in the dark, the hopes quietly unfolding in the morning light: all become rosy clouds on the page, trembling softly in the depths of time. This is not one person's story, but the clear and burning epitaph shared by all the souls who have ever lingered in youth.

Spring: First Blossoms

Youth begins with the first drop of morning dew. On a morning when the remaining snow melts away, a timid yellow-green shoots up from the soil, like the first tremor in a boy's fingers as they touch the strings of a qin. The wind is soft, as soft as the lullaby a mother once hummed. Willow shoots sprout, green to the point of transparency, as though they might shatter in the breeze at a touch. Back then, we saw everything through a filter: we read a shower as a wistful poem, and took a drifting cloud for a letter sent from afar. Peach blossoms are youth's first blush. They burn across the hills and fields, setting our hearts aflutter. We walked beneath the trees