Ongoing Moments: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department respond to a photograph of their choice. [Read all entries.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.]
It can never go back again.
It had lived its life by routine ever since. Life came to a moment of peace. Happiness, fear and depression were far gone. Stay in here. It had learned that how much it paid for struggling to have one day out there. Peering through the stained-glass window, it realized it would never freely stroll by the Seine and taste the stunning view. Its clay flowerpot in the windowsill that once had lived and breathed was in the sear. This was its life, silent as the life had always been and tranquil, as if the life had never been wrecked.
It had gone through good moments. It had tea under a tree in Heather Land in warm April; it had tranced at the glittering Riverside in shimmering June; it admired the blossom at Fountain Blue in pleasant October; it had a lovely ramble around Wind Lake on a November morning. It wore diamonds from its beloved to the soirée in the Hall of Mirrors with a cheery grin; it gazed at green lawns through spokes of the gate of Queen’s Gallery with delight; it fancied the murmur of the sea gently coming all the way up to the ferry at Trevanion Riverside. These joys were no more in life but permanent in mind. It wondered what its life would be today, if it had stayed where it belonged.
It had gone through hard times. The diamonds brought a battle that it and its beloved had to conquer. To save her honour and life, it sailed out to escort the diamonds back to where it was. Nothing held it back and no way was barred to it. But the ferry it took could not stand out of the storm and sunk in the ever-gentle murmur of the sea. It survived. Finally, it came all the way back to return the jewels, but found the beloved ended in gallows in the ever-green lawns.
Life came to a state of being forlorn. It was trapped and deprived of the blossom in the clay flowerpot, the diamonds, the purplish-pink heathers, the sea-green ferry, and everything it had ever treasured. Nothing but memories haunted, the good ones and the bad ones; the past stirred whenever it tried to put them behind.
It can never go back again. It never intends to..
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Liu Yuwei is a PhD student at the Department of English Language and Literature and a moderator of Agora. [Click here to read all entries by Yuwei.]
Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University 