Longing Always Beneath the Banyan Tree

I often look back on the past, on that sunlit season, on her sorrowful face. I had simply forgotten those colorful passages of youth. I will pick up those sorrowful words and nourish them with every bit of joy in my life.

They all say, “Turn around and take a look! Look back at the past!” But I truly don’t have the courage to gather up that shattered youth.

She was the salvation of my life. She gave me the courage to face those mysterious memories and the bleak, stormy future.

I gaze up at the sky and down at the earth. There is sunlight in the sky, and the earth is dappled with its shadows.

When she stood before me, tears streaming down her face, I suddenly awoke from a dream I could never seem to escape.

But a dream is only a dream, and she was not standing before me.

I don’t know how much joy and sorrow filled those years, some fleeting, some enduring.

Yet it was precisely those joys and sorrows that lit up my barren future.

Many years from now, I’ll look back too, at the road I’ve traveled and at her, who once walked it with me.

But that is all in the past now, and her face looks so clear only in that photograph.

She left me, but she never said where she went.

Afterward, I often used my dreams to measure the distance between heaven and hell.

Afterward, I often smiled, already with tears streaming down my face.

Afterward, I gathered up those lean years between harvests, and those memories too painful to revisit.

Afterward, all that remained was me, standing here, singing at the top of my voice...