After a separation of forty-five days and nights, as I return to the school gate, the grass sprouts emerging from the cracks in the blue bricks are gnawing at the lingering chill of late winter. The elevator, resembling a metal cage, descends with young bodies, the taste of rust seeping from their tightly clenched fingers around their phones, condensing into murky dewdrops on the digital display. The tilted electric bikes outside the back door are like dominoes, always knocked over by hurried tires on some morning, and I wrap my coat tighter as I sidestep the domino formation, still holding onto the warmth of a stranger I helped three years ago.
The stretch from the research building to the information engineering building, measured countless times at dawn and dusk, now unfolds like silk beneath my soles. It turns out that three years are merely three layers of plum blossom letters, and my footsteps will eventually become a faded bookmark in the school history museum. The pessimist steals three years along the fifty-year journey of life, as if gazing at the frozen struggle in amber.
During my internship, I often suspected I had a misanthropic illness, but later I understood it was merely the survival of the fittest. When the neon lights outside the glass curtain wall flicker simultaneously with experimental data, I suddenly long for the diamond-shaped light spots that leak from the library dome—those days and nights torn apart by papers and test tubes have woven into a soft cocoon that shelters me.
In the morning mist, the birds' chirping sounds like shattered jade falling into a clear spring; such heavenly sounds are even scarce in the deep mountains of my hometown. The plum tree blooms again in its old position, and within the shadows of twenty-three years of flowers, the hum of a centrifuge floats, while the lingering fragrance of twenty-four years has stained the ink of my departure procedures. The sage said that the deceased are like this, referring to the three cycles of blooming and withering, allowing me to gather only two unfinished poems.
They always say that Jiangnan should have hazy rain, but here the moisture is clearly the faded ink and light colors of meticulous ink wash. Only that year in the countryside of Jinling did I truly see the world transform into blue smoke behind the rain curtain, like the ink that spreads on rice paper. Now, as parting approaches, I wish to preserve the silhouette of this garden as secret-colored porcelain—after all, in the most bewildering years, it has sheltered all my perplexities with its folds, and adorned each fold with the golden edge of plum fragrance.
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