夏天的一晚上

I found this browsing through my computer. It was the very first composition I wrote for Chinese in the fall. The English translation's not the best, someone once told me. And he is right. The Chinese is better. It's like there are two planes, and a graph on one cannot exactly project onto another. The blurriness is always what people who write fight against, and also what we want to preserve. The mathematics of language is an oxymoron, but only because the laborers make it so.

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夏天初期的一晚上，我碰见了你。

那时候，夜里吹着一股凉爽的微风，悄悄的来，偷看我们之间表演的戏。你好像也感觉到了这个未被邀请的客人 ， 因为你什么也没有说，虽然你的眼光告诉了我很多。

那天晚上，我以为那风是空手的走的，但是后来我才明白，时间和它，什么都有权利带走， 包括记忆中的一晚上，包括记忆中的你。

夏天，也就是这样糊里糊涂的过去。

转眼就到了九月的第一场雨。那些蒙蒙的雨滴， 和树上的黄叶，一个一个的掉下来，落到一股熟悉的风中。那一刻，风带回来了你原先的眼光，但是没有带回来原先的你。

Some time in the spring, when the air was filled with possibility, I met you.

That night, there was a crisp breeze, quietly creeping up, watching the play that unfolded between us. You seemed to also realize that we have an interloper among us, because you didn’t say anything, though your glance betrayed more than the wind can tell.

On that night, I thought the air left empty-handed, but this summer I understood; time and the wind, they can take away everything, including the memory of a night, including the memory of you.

Summer was more or less spent this way, hazily yet in a flash…all the way until the first rain of September. The lazy raindrops and yellowing leaves fell from the sky one by one, until they land in a familiar breeze. And in that instant, the wind brought back last summer's glance, but didn’t bring back last summer's you.

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