On the first day of elementary school, he and I held hands and crossed several streets to Victoria Elementary School. In early September, apple and pear trees in every yard were studded with fist-sized fruit, and the branches drooped because of the weight, overstepping the hedges and catching the hair of passers-by.
Many, many children are waiting on the playground for the first bell to ring. The small hand, wrapped in the palm of Daddy's and Mom's hands, looked around timidly. They are kindergarten graduates, but they don't yet know a law: the graduation of one thing is always the beginning of another.
As soon as the bell rang, there were a variety of shadows running in different directions, but in the midst of so many crowds of people, I looked at the back of my child with great clarity—as if you could still hear exactly where you were when a hundred babies were crying at the same time. Hua An walked forward carrying a colorful school bag, but he kept looking back; it was as if crossing an endless river of time and space, and his gaze and my gaze met in the air.
I watched his thin back disappear into the door.
At the age of sixteen, he went to the United States as an exchange student for a year. I took him to the airport. When I said goodbye, I hugged as usual, and my head could only be pressed against his chest, as if holding the feet of a giraffe. He was clearly grudgingly enduring his mother's affection.
He was in the long line, waiting for the passport check; I stood outside, following his back with my eyes inch by inch. Finally it was his turn to stop at the customs window for a moment, then take his passport back, flash into a door, and disappear.
I had been waiting, waiting for a glance back before he disappeared. But he didn't, not once.
Now he's twenty-one years old, and he's in college, which happens to be the one where I teach. But even on the same road, he didn't want to take my car. Even in the same car, he put on headphones—music that only one person could listen to, a closed door. Sometimes he was waiting for the bus across the street, and I looked down from the window of a tall building: a tall, thin young man with eyes looking at the gray sea; I could only imagine that his inner world was as deep and choppy as mine, but I could not enter it. After a while the bus came and blocked his figure. The car drove away, an empty street with only a postbox standing.
I slowly and slowly learned that the so-called father-daughter mother-son relationship only means that your fate with him is that you are constantly watching his back drift away in this life and this life. You stand at this end of the path, watching him fade away where the path turns, and, silently telling you with his back: No need to chase.
Slowly, slowly, I realized that my loneliness seemed to be related to another shadow.
After my Ph.D., I went back to Taiwan to teach. On my first day of college registration, my father delivered me long distances in his cheap pickup truck carrying feed. It wasn't until I realized that he hadn't driven to the main entrance of the university, but had stopped at the narrow alley at the side door. After unloading his luggage, he climbed back into the car, ready to go back, obviously started the engine, but then rolled down the window, his head outstretched and said: "Daughter, Dad feels very sorry for you, this kind of car is really not a car for a university professor." ”
I watched as his pickup truck carefully reversed and then popped out of the alley, leaving a cloud of black smoke. Until the car turned out of sight, I was still standing there, next to a suitcase.
Every week I went to the hospital to see him, and it was more than ten years later. Pushing his wheelchair for a walk, his head hanging low to his chest. Once, when I found excrement all over his pant legs, I squatted down and wiped him with my handkerchief, and my skirt was stained with feces, but I had to rush back to Taipei to work. The nurse took his wheelchair, and I picked up my purse, looked at the back of the wheelchair, paused in front of the automatic glass door, and then didn't enter.
I always ran to the airport in the twilight.
In front of the furnace door of the crematorium, the coffin was a huge and heavy drawer, sliding slowly forward. I didn't expect to be able to stand so close, only five meters away from the furnace door. The rain was sloped by the wind and drifted into the promenade. I brushed the rain-wet hair on my forehead and gazed deeply, deeply, hoping to remember this last sight.
I slowly and slowly learned that the so-called father-daughter mother-son relationship only means that your fate with him is that you are constantly watching his back drift away in this life and this life. You stand at this end of the path, watching him fade away where the path turns, and, silently telling you with his back: No need to chase.