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3 minute read
Fifty Years Later Maxwell Zhou
Fifty Years Later
Fifty years later, would he be the same as when I first met him fifty years before? Would his hair that once had been so dark and bright turn to tufts of silver, transparent under the blazing sun of July just as mine had shone – would he recall the golden strands of hair under the very same sun fifty years ago, that I so proudly wore upon my head. Would he remember that blonde braid that he used to unwind, rewind, unwind, and wind again with his smooth caressing hands. Or would he revisit the town dwelling amid the vast corn fields where we had strolled along the river bank, watching the last rays of evening sun dyeing the clouds red and violet and burning in the dimming sky. – Would he walk the bridge again? Would he walk the bridge with a stick in his hand, and feel with his slightly trembling feet the arch that we once stood upon, silently leaning against each other’s shoulders; listening to the finches that sang the falling of the night; Maxwell Zhou
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and looking at swallows that slid through the undulating waves one after another – so carefree, so joyful – and vanished in the passing time. And would he visit that antique store once more the store where he picked up a red headcloth with scattered white stars and laid it on my hair – O would he remember that moment when our eyes met, each of us staring into the other’s heart, (I remember the noon sun shone through the dusty window panes) and smiling in happiness – would he weep, O, would he weep for me if soft breeze would pass by his floppy face like the wind that brought summer away fifty years ago, the wind that witnessed us depart. Would tears flow down his wrinkled cheeks, when the last of summer wind would blow –like it did fifty years ago –like I did fifty years before –and would he think of me –
No! – He wouldn’t. He can’t. He cannot have me as a part of his memory; he would not recall all those many summertime stories he wrote and composed with his own life, the stories which he would never tell to his children and grandchildren, the stories that would belong
only to a man’s deepest solitude (except the sometime emancipation at night in the presence of heavy liquor) and die alone within his aging heart, settling in an oblivion of faded nothingness. – But there is one thing that I am sure – I know he would – that fifty years later, when he would one day scavenge in the boxes and cupboards trying to find the times lost in the past, and hold the stack of yellowed paper from fifty years before; when he would touch the frail paper with his shivering fingers and read the lines with his glasses on under the glowing lamp light; when he would read out the words, the phrases, the lines, the long and flowing breaths of my poetry and prose, stemming directly from my soul fifty years ago, he would murmur the very sentences I once wrote, like he did fifty years before, in the cool but lonely summer nights with me by his side, my head upon his shoulders, and my hands upon his knees; in those youthful lines, he would see me alive before him again, my skin, my smile, my breath, my soul; he would feel me across the boundaries of time through his incessant incantation of the writings he cherished, the bridge from soul to soul.