Step by Step, Rising Like a Lotus

Lately the stream in front of my door has risen,

and my lover’s boat has stolen by to visit me several times.

The boat is too small to unfurl the red brocade canopy.

There is nothing I can do but sigh in the shadow of our entwined forms.

I wish I could become a red lotus,

growing year after year on the autumn river.

And I wish my lover could become the waves beneath the flowers,

with no barrier between us, following the wind and rain as we come and go.

I am a lotus.

I devoted myself to cultivation for twelve hundred years, yet all I gained was a demon’s body. I never became an immortal.

I am glad that, somehow, this secret remained hidden. No immortal, demon, spirit, or monster could detect it.

Everyone thought I was a little lotus fairy.

Then I met someone. No, an immortal.

I fell in love with a mortal.

Sadly, he did not.

All he wanted was to make a name for himself and claim a place at the next great investiture of the gods.

I was willing to make his dream come true, even if it meant sacrificing my own wishes.

But when he had achieved fame and success, I realized that he was the reason I could never become an immortal.

And just as he reached the pinnacle of his success, I had to accept my fate: to be captured as a flower demon, cast into the cycle of reincarnation, and made to suffer countless hardships...

That sacrifice finally stirred a trace of feeling in him.

Yet I no longer wished to take the hand he reached out to me.

Because I did not want to be a tear in his heart, born of guilt and pity.

What I wanted was to be a lotus, blooming in his heart.

2015.7.22: It seems the characters for “life” and “lotus” can no longer be used together, so I changed the title as requested.

Theme: A wish spanning a thousand autumns, to meet here year after year.