A Farewell in the Dust

I merely walked through the campus, stirring up a little dust. That alone might have blurred my vision, but somehow I could still see everything so clearly. I wanted to keep her, just as I wanted to keep myself. Yet I had fallen into a place I did not know, just as she had fallen into a place unknown to me. I do not know whether pear blossoms still bloom there. If they do, they are no more than a starkly pale mockery of my swollen youth and love. My youth and my love: I can now say with a smile that they truly once existed. So I preserved the traces of that existence in words, only because she might come to know of them. But I did not know, and then at last I learned, that these words would also call forth the youth and love of so many others, scattering pear blossoms across the starkly pale pages. If readers are willing to spare a little time, take these words as something to savor for amusement, though amusement was never what I had in mind.

Excerpts from the book: 1. The heavy sky was still pouring out its threads of sorrow, weaving a brocade on a night of flashing thunder. Flowers embroidered upon brocade, yet the blossoms were bitter buds born of cold-colored tears. 2. Then we walked slowly again, until we drifted into that beautiful night, bent toward a hazy smile, and picked up the fallen shadows of flowers. 3. In the ocean of love, I am a sluggish fish, rolling my eyes in the tangled waters, the spines digging deep into my body as I spew endless bubbles at myself. 4. I am a grass seed ripening in autumn. It is an autumn of pain, pain that tears at the heart. When I split open my heart and burst into a petal of wind, I sink into the earth. I love this earth; it bears your footprints. I know your footprints. How could I not, when you once came here? I have settled into your tracks, so you can take me wherever you go. 5. I so hope that beneath her feet lies a firm and graceful fullness, everything in its place: flowers in radiant bloom, leaves in quiet beauty. Perhaps I could be a stone beside her, a gravestone or a threshold, anything that would accept my presence, neither ignoring me nor speaking of it. 6. Your name is a butterfly, fading in the smile that died within me. But please, quietly, ever so quietly, pick it up again and carve it onto my tombstone. On a spring morning, let it rise into a butterfly dance beside my name, then fly farther and farther away until at last it comes to rest among the pear blossoms.