One morning, when I woke from troubled dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into a container of water that’s broken all over. Water would spill out of me at any moment in even a slightest collision with the mad world, and it’s startling to see that there’s so much water inside of me, as if I’d never be drained.

Water and various bodies of it are versatile expressions that frequent my writing, sometimes in their literal sense, other times used metaphorically, possibly under the influence of classical Chinese literature—the old masters are somehow obsessed with drawing an analogy between water and time; my favourite writer, for example, argues that although time passes by just like water in the river, the water is never really gone, because the river keeps running.

(In case anyone’s interested, this writer has an unduly delicious romanized name, Su Shi.)

It is perhaps no coincidence that when I think about cities in which I have resided, even for as short as a month, the scene that first comes to my mind is always water-related, either rivers, lakes, the sea, or swimming pools. As a matter of fact, occasionally I wonder if I’ve spent too much time on the waterside. As a matter of fact, constantly I regret that the weather does not allow me to be in the water; why’s summer always fleeting?

In the town where I live, it is absolutely not the wisest decision to jump into the murky water—although a friend courageously claimed he’s willing to drink it if rewarded with a thousand euros—but being on the waterside on a clear day, be it morning, afternoon, or evening, is definitely a terrific experience, the experience. It’s like we fight our way through the long cold winter only for the sake of such a moment, like as soon as the sun’s finally out, we forget all about the once-prevailing darkness.

Actually there are two kinds of moments in life that are worth all the sufferings. For the first kind, when it arrives you won’t realize how special it is, assuming that more are on their way, and after you fritter it away, you come to regret that it has just disappeared like a raindrop falling into the sea. And the other kind, it appears in your life already like a shining star, you feel grateful for having bathed in its light, you wish that it could stay forever, you make futile attempts to store the light and, as expected, fail spectacularly, and sentences from books you’ve read at a younger age would resurface, finally making sense to you—they were never wrong, the old masters.

The first time I sat with a friend beside a canal in the town centre amid the perfect sunlight that had been gone from our life here for half a year, watching boats coming and going, water birds flying and swimming, people standing on the bridges smiling and waving to those on the boats, people enjoying drinks and snacks on the terrace of the nice little restaurants behind us, we both somehow felt it unreal, as if we had stolen the moment—we were speaking Chinese then, and now writing about it I’ve tried several times to deliver the meaning in English, but it seems the sentence would always scan better when ending with ‘from someone else’, whether I use passive voice or the emphatic structure, while such a phrase is totally needless in our Chinese expression. And I’m dwelling on ‘from someone else’, because when I told my therapist about the thought, in Chinese, with the phrase omitted, she asked perceptively, Since it’s stolen, it has to be from another person, then who is that? I was dumbfounded, unable to come up with an answer. I still can’t.

But anyway, it felt as if the moment had been taken from a victim of theft who’s yet to be identified. The same feeling persists, creeping up on me and giving me a sharp blow whenever I get a bit carried away by joy. Is this happening to me? Do I really deserve it?

Last year I read a fantasy story in classical Chinese about love affairs between flower nymphs and a human being, and one sentence struck me as so painfully impressive that I still remember it character by character:

Although we are together today, I beg you not to take it as reality. Rather, it would be better to just think of it as a dream.
今虽相聚，勿以为真，但作梦寐观可耳。

Pu Songling 蒲松龄, ‘Xiangyu’ 香玉

I’d call it clear-headed detachment, which constitutes a somewhat effective approach to handling the undesirable yet unstoppable changes in life and in a way echoes Mycroft Sherlock’s stone-cold line—

All lives end. All hearts are broken. Caring is not an advantage.

Sherlock, S2E1

Unfortunately, whereas one can be rational enough to resist the unnecessary urge to jump into murky canals, it is rather challenging to combat the maybe-not-so-subconscious desires to care. And as one of the ensuing disadvantages my entire June was flooded with immense sadness, or self-diagnosed separation anxiety. Since graduation from my bachelor’s I’ve assumed myself to have grown accustomed to being apart from close friends, but saying goodbye is not a scenario where practice makes perfect. Not only my life here keeps bringing me surprises, but I often surprise myself as well with the intensity of my feelings, the profound depth of a newly discovered reservoir. At times like this I instinctively resort to what the old masters have to say, for as long as others have had similar thoughts and feelings in similar scenarios, mine would be justifiable.

There’s a haunting poem from over twelve centuries ago that ends with this melancholy line:

Tomorrow we’d be separated by mountains, with little knowledge of what’ll happen to each other in the bleak world.
明日隔山岳，世事两茫茫。

Du Fu 杜甫, ‘To Wei Ba’ 赠卫八处士

Yet the necessary condition for the final heartbreaking separation is one or more preceding unions, like the night two months ago spent on a canal-side lawn with friends, a dream from which I had been reluctant to wake up, a beautiful stretch of stolen time.

Despite its likeness to scenes in a French movie set in Paris, Les passagers de la nuit, one of my 2o22 favourites, the static image doesn’t do justice to the original live version kept in my phone—with sounds, which I almost missed!—in which the flickering lights reflected in the ripples are reminiscent of another line in the aforementioned poem:

What a memorable night is tonight, when I share the candlelight with you.
今夕复何夕，共此灯烛光。

And it is in the sorrowful contentment that the separation is enfolded, Du Fu’s and mine alike. The time thief should be grateful that the water-like moments have stayed in their palm before flowing away through the gaps between fingers. After all, what’s not momentary in the universe?