Do you understand？ During these years, when I arrived at Jin-Shan, the first thing I would do was walking to the beach near the Youth Activity Center. I often entered the beach at the back of the swimming pool. The waves pounded against the beach, as usual. Sometimes you just cannot tell if the pine trees have become thicker than before or if the beach has become steeper than it used to be. Then I sit on the beach watching the sun setting, and the fishing boat floats on the distant sea.
And now, I am completely with you. With you, and all of the youthful days, with the dream, and with the banana tree leaves floating on the water sound of the Jinshan Activity Center.
We used to sit on the same beach watching the same sunset. We didn’t want to leave, wishing to engrave the landscapes deep inside our hearts.
Years later, time seems not be able to control us any longer. Look: the time falls on the sound of the waves, falls on the clouds and the sparkling light above the Jin-Shan Bay, falls on the boats sailing to different places in the world, with the missions in minds, braving the wind and tides towards the destinations.
At that time, we used to pick up sticks on the beach. The wind rustled through the woods, awakening the sleeping birds and pines. Consequently, the camp fire danced with vivid flames, dancing on our faces. The wind rolled up the sand, threshing against our foreheads. The faraway fishing boats were like lily lanterns, with tiny fire being lit, flickering in the darkness. The villages along the coast were asleep but we did not want to come back to the boarding house.
When we got back to the dormitory of the Jin Shan activity center, the wind fell on the fences and the pavilions in the dark. The pine trees curled their hair like crazy men.
We lay in the bunkbed and turned off the light. A moon shone in the yard, perhaps spreading its light evenly into the fishing villages along the coast.
You said you hear a piece of banana leave falling into the seashell sand on the beach.
Maybe it was our dream, carefree, allowing the suspending electricity fans to swirl slowing, taking us into the ancient time.
We sat on the camping ground to have brunch. A few cleaning ladies were drying the sheets under the sun. The sheets were hung on the ropes, and as the wind blew through, the flavors of the tourists who had already left the activity center could be smelt, leaving their remaining traces of the short visit right here in the smell of the morning air.
Time was the wind, the light, the mountains, and the sea. Time belonged to the beech of Jin Shan and the cleaning ladies’ smile. The wind hung all of the elements in the wind, like a book of memories that could not be forgotten.
Once you were in this book, and because it was you, it could not be replaced of. Youth is like this. It is a non-reversible book of memories that cannot be replaced of by someone else.
Once we strolled in the woods of the Jin Shan activity center. Not visitors were seen on the path. It seemed that the world would be ended here on the shore. Unknown birds produced a variety of chirping sounds, sometimes crisply and at times sharp, fanatically shrieking, as if dreaming of the frequently visiting monkeys from the ancient path in the neighboring mountains.
I said, Is it right that we chose to study medicine?
You said, after all, we have decided to save the diseased.
I said, but how many could we save?
We walked passing a tree, and you said, don’t move.
A snake stood still in the three, with its tongue fork threshing in and out.
It is not poisonous. Turn your head slowly, you said.
I quickly turned my head and a twig accidently was inserted into my forehead.
You said, you are bleeding. You asked me to sit on the ground and you took out a handkerchief to stop the bleeding.
I said, is the wound deep?
You said, no, but I could see the bone.
You laughed, and I also laughed.
The time seemed to be coagulated, like the blood in the wound. A few butterflies dipping in the air and the trees, flying over us and stopped on the bamboo fence.
Many years later, we left the medical school and entered the hospitals. We were running back and forth between the emergency room and shadow dreams, between the operation agreement application forms and the formation of death certifications, between the signatures and the stillness after some papers were signed.
We were gradually leaving this path, leaving this beach behind, and the villages of the north coast in our childhood stand still by the sea and on the hills, overlooking the butterflies flittering through the cobble stone trail, which was lit by the dots of sunlight.
I came back to the beach of Jin Shan Activity Center, wanting to feel again the freedom and tranquility of the youthful days.
How about you?
Could I go back to that dream with you again?
Could I remember that banana leaving floating on the sea?
Lighting falling into the sea, the body is flapped by the tides.
I do not want to overly interpret the meaning of a still body. We are accustomed to the uncertainty of lives. The capability of creativity and fantasizing that existed in us made us survive. We would treat life and death as a metaphor, a kind of color, a movement of drifting slowing into stillness, a slow and graceful moment that falls onto the sand of the seashore, without debates, without interpretation, and it is indeed a speechless freedom.
We rode a motorbike heading towards the old street of Jin Shan Township in a September afternoon. We passed a street, and the sea was shining like a mirror. A man with a pipe in his mouth fixed his eyes on the beach. The man looked at me and I seemed to be able to see a few decades later how I would have looked like: the sea and salt carved up my face, and with the confidence of diving into the currents, the confident mind had been taken away into the currents between the fishing boats and the waves, between the star map and silence, floating with the firecrackers and firework that are only being displayed in Chinese New Year and the occasionally appeared ambulance that rushes through to the Jin Shan Hospital.
The old man said, Please buy a wind bell. I seemed to see him selling the emotion of the wind. The wind is a combination of the sea wind and the wind from the mountain, blowing the belief and blindness that we hold onto this life and the afterlife.
A female cat guided a group of tiny cats hid in the thorny bushes on the coast. They were careful. They wanted to pass the highway to a place near the cliff that they were familiar with. Maybe they had just finished up the fish the mother cat had caught in the lagoons, and they wanted to adventure themselves back to their home.
They reminded of the frogs that carelessly jumped on the highway and a cargo truck that was carefully driven by a diligent worker and who would never see the flattened bodies of the frogs that his tires had done to them at night.
When we were students, we were not as sensitive and sentimental as the cats. Our shadows were small under the motorbike, and the wind from the sea had the flavor of sea weeds.
On the steep hills, tufts of white and yellow flowers dotted among the bushes. They caught the wind, and they caught the peace in the wind.
Because of your companionship, I could discover the meaning of landscapes, and thus the flowing of time in the wind became meaningful at your presence.
In the days of travelling, memories could be very simple. A whistle, then the bay is right in front of us, and the sea shines with its calmness, like numerous cats’ eyes.
You walk under the banana trees, and you have followed you dream, in the clouds of the sea on the north coast shore. You are walking in the clouds.
When I walk back to the Jin Shan activity center, the cicadas shrieked like the torrents, falling onto the sea, onto the memories.
You have disappeared.
Only the sea is left.
We have chosen the road and left this seashore, and we came to the cities, to become doctors, to save patients, to save the sickness.
Only in the late night, when we woke up in different cities, could we remember the water crawling up to the beach, curling into our heart, there was a long long beach, rustling, mumming, letting go the worries, and letting us go to all directions.
In my mind, there is always a path, located inside the Jin Shan activity center, in the woods. The path leads towards the beach, to the sand that we are familiar with.
The rock seems to wake up from the dream, and it asked me, where is your friend? Didn’t he come back?
A flower wavers in the wind.
It is one of the flowers that have grown full on the steep cliffs along the coasts on the way to the old street.
It is a story of the spring, when you will come back.
I hope to see you in my dream.
In the dream, you will say to me, it is poisonous, just turn your head.
I turn my head.
The vast ocean is under the moonlight, and all night, the sparking light dots.