In April, I Was Murmuring Your Name

◎朱紹雨（著） 李黎（譯）

In April, I Was Murmuring Your Name

◎朱紹雨（著） 李黎（譯）

It was long afterward that I was aware that you had hesitated for a whole spring before sending me the letter. The days after separating with you, I silently read what you had wrote over and over again, living through imaginary spring days in my mind over the wintertime in the northland. Once I told you: please write me to share your feelings about the spring in your city. In answer to my request, you photographed your campus in the rising sun——your most desired place to take a photo with me. However, I failed to keep the appointment, the leafy trees thus didn’t witness our happiness any longer.

Sorry, I still cherish the memory of the days spent with you one year after your leaving. It’s a farewell, the final farewell—only connected with me. I’m saying good-bye to your receding figure. On the day before I left for Qingdao, holding my hands, you said sincerely, “I’m seeing you off tomorrow noon. Wait for me at the airport.” I told you I was not accustomed to being seen off, but you insisted, “you’ll have to get used to it in the future.”

I looked at you in silence. That was the most impressed sweet words I had ever heard.

I was expecting you, and your embrace at the airport, with the hope of bringing your embrace back to Qingdao. Unfortunately, you didn’t turn up. I boarded the plane disappointedly, recalling your apologies——“I’m sorry”. As a result, I returned Qingdao alone, with an empty stomach. But it never occurred to me that it was the last farewell.

The last farewell, in another word, it is not destined for us to meet again in the rest of our life.

Since then, I began to write letters, to write down my feelings about the days without your accompany. My wistful thoughts, like the drizzle of May, showered in my mind but couldn’t reach your heart. I received neither your forgiveness nor your reply. Separating with you, I was just like a homeless kid, anxiously expecting the next spring.

I assumed that together with spring, you would come back step by step.

In the fields, the flowers have bloomed and withered, but the swallows flying back north never appear within my sight.

It has been one year since we separated in Yangcheng (another name of Guangzhou City), and I have been writing to you for one year, but in no case do I have the courage to cross the accumulated, hill-like letters. It seemed to take a century for me to write this letter of farewell. Repeatedly, I wrote and revised. When I look backward, you have left me far away, yet we haven’t said good-bye to each other, for there is not enough time for us to wave. I can only watch you fade away in my mind. The longer distance I see you off, the more distressed I am. Distress, as well as my thoughts of you, is brewing like wine. Standing on the cross road, I’m expecting the clouds which have gone with the wind.

The second time I came to see you, I didn’t hug you either, though I was so close to you. I didn’t even hand over the collection I wrote for you in person. From this time on, your adorable smile, and the warmth of your palm, couldn’t be felt by me any longer. I then wrote down the lines on the first page of the collection:

In this world, I try to understand common people, and you.

I take down my feelings while understanding.

With one collection writing about you.

And the other left for the coming years.

Inhabitedin different parts of the world, we both hold a collection in hands. When I read it again, the old times seem to be visible before my eyes. Listening to the songs we listened to together once and once again, I am immersed to the gloomy tunes. I’m still “a loner who travels through the noisy city”. With the end of fate, we are doomed to pass by each other, to pass by “a happy ending”, and we are not able to “spend every sweet day together”.

Once again, I read your letter, but I fail to recall the feelings at the first sight of you. Perhaps I have got used to silent farewell, I have buried all my intense emotions. Holding the letter paper, I’m murmuring your name, incredibly calm. Though you left little to me, I have to get through such a long, long memory.

During the long years in the future, I will still bless you. The same bright moon is shining over the sky of both Qingdao and Yangcheng; similarly, April days visit both the northland and the southland. The smell of spring hidden within your letter will also reach the rest of our life year-in-yearout. You will never come back to me, but your name, and your letter, will remain in April forever. While reading the letter and murmuring your name, my thoughts are waving through the light in my room, reaching far into the boundless and indistinct darkness... I will never forget, once I held you tight, in a rainy night.

（作者單位：青島大學）