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The city stands here,
before and after, above and below, across and through,
the eternity and void at the end of history.
Great, eternal, magnificent,
moving mountains and filling seas, unshakable.
Black, white, red.
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Lost, lost.
I don’t even know what I’ve lost
nor where I lost it
Walking down the road
my hands fumble in my pockets
Before stepping into the wilderness, I had a long, all-night conversation with the watchmaker who suffered from dementia. That night, I witnessed the disassembly of a pocket watch, which later made my life in the city fraught with hardship, each step a struggle. Back then, the inn hadn’t yet installed electric lights, and the wind howling through the walls repeatedly snuffed out the candles, releasing the scent of sacrificial offerings. My conversation with the old watchmaker flickered intermittently in the unsteady candlelight. The crumbling inn, the feverishly burning moon, the endless pauses—I could almost see intangible things flitting through the phosphorescent air, while the watchmaker’s hands, fiddling with the pocket watch, were as parched as cracked earth in the dry season of the north. Later, whenever I recalled the hollow, drawn-out talk of that night, my vision would grow unbearably sluggish and distorted. The sound of sandpaper grating against bone often forced me to stop my work, my eyes unfocused, and my busy yet idle daily life thus lost all its meaning—until I stepped into the wilderness.
The inn, the city where I lived, was often seen as a symbol of civilization. Cyclists passing by on autumn evenings would often be struck by sudden, fierce gusts of wind and sand, their strange smiles wiped away as they scrambled for shelter under low eaves. I stood on the sprawling overpass, flipping through an unnamed journal, while uniformed movers busied themselves unloading that day’s newspapers from sealed mail trucks and reloading expired ones to be sent to the incinerator—I once wondered if that might be everyone’s final resting place, but the thought vanished after witnessing the watchmaker’s death. Machines of all shapes and sizes spewed identical thick smoke from their tails, blending with the ever-present dust of the city, becoming something people either flaunted or ignored. The people stepping out of taxis lingered indecisively on either side of countless clock pendulums. These noisy scenes were haphazardly strung together amidst falling leaves and recorded by me at the end of my journal. No one else would mourn or write about them.
Sweating, sweating. Thinking this, I couldn’t help but tremble with fear. What had I forgotten? Maybe I’d forgotten. I pulled out my pocket watch—still early before sunset. What should I eat for dinner?… I couldn’t remember owning anything, nor was there anyone worth thinking about besides the watchmaker. What could it be?… A thought? Probably…
Before the sun sets,
people have no time to ponder
the horror of this song’s finale.
Before the sun sets
people have no time to ponder
the horror of the finale of this song
The journal I clutched repeatedly claimed the words within were detailed and important, but in truth, the events I’d altered were impossible to trace once time had passed. Belief and disbelief rested on a whim. Resentfully, I left the inn and whiled away the day among streets crammed with goods and lines of flashy but empty words.
That evening, on a tattered page of the journal, my reunion with the old watchmaker halted some grand scheme I’d been plotting. Clutching a half-torn train ticket, I circled aimlessly between stops on the loop line. More white-uniformed figures loitered, alarms thundered, and I couldn’t even see the stars. Through a fragment of text in the journal, I glimpsed the old watchmaker. He sat in that shabby little inn, repeatedly dismantling the pocket watch that had never worked, then piecing it back together. The flickering light in the inn was blinding, yet it didn’t hinder his work. Perhaps the so-called experience he’d accumulated over years of repairing watches was just a perception of time forged over endless years.
By then, I’d lived beside the old watchmaker for many years. The city’s stifling air, the ever-layering dreams, the silent white-clad figures—all plunged me into the oblivion of past and future, leaving me bewildered. Some say life only attains eternity through forgetting, yet my life withered and peeled away in that oblivion, like lacquerware growing increasingly mottled in the autumn wind. Trembling with fear, trembling with fear. In truth, every dream of mine those nights was leaking air. In the early days, I’d unconsciously hear the watchmaker’s trembling, incoherent voice whistling out of my ears. It had a ceramic rhythm, like the sound of sandpaper grating against bone—shhh, shhh.
“What are you doing? I see you do the same thing every day. If not for the clocks slowing down lately, I’d think yesterday was tomorrow, and the day after was the day before.” I remember staring at the watchmaker for a long time before finally asking.
He said it was a good question. He’d spent years searching for today. He kept searching. But he could never figure out which moment on the clock “now” belonged to, and the only thing the watchmaker could rely on was the clock itself. I think the “now” he longed for was either fleeting or perpetually delayed, because he could never engrave the precise time—the two gilded characters for “now”—onto that pocket watch he’d been repairing for years.
The watchmaker would often wipe sweat from his brow and sigh, saying the reason his pocket watch wouldn’t work was that he couldn’t engrave the correct time on its face.
Suddenly, the train stopped again before a platform adorned with ads and lights. Crowds filed out in some customary order—rules set by the white coats—while another swarm pushed in. A hat, knocked off during boarding, fell outside the door, its owner’s awkward hand suspended mid-air as the other hand spilled a bag of trivialities, scattering them noisily across the ground. Inside the carriage, laughter and chaos rose and fell, forming the content and meaning of many lives. As the train started moving, the roar shattered my perception of time once more. A bold idea of unknown origin, once shelved in a noisy corner due to my casual forgetfulness, now lingered in the dusty air, its details obscured.
A deep terror seized me. That idea grew clearer in my mind.
I’ve long endured an unnamed illness,
but the old doctor who examined me didn’t understand the ailments of youth
He dared to call me healthy：
You’re just
undergoing extreme trials!
Extreme exhaustion!
If the pocket watch was accurate, it was midnight. Alone on the terminal platform, I closed the worn journal in my hand and watched trains from different directions glide into the abyssal garage with identical expressions, like bombs sinking into craters or air forced into lungs. Cleaners with yellow armbands moved slowly, sweeping footprints off the platform. According to regulations, their work was a necessary step to welcome the next day. On the surface, everything seemed reasonable, orderly, and many glorified excuses now appeared justified. Some radicals of those words had weathered into ruins over the years.
Exhausted, suddenly—the commuting crowds were gone, the last red of the sun withdrawn. A stark, weary silhouette, outlined in hard lines, intruded into my journal. There, in the dim streetlight, the numb-faced watchmaker slumped between two lines of text, the dull surface of his old watch coldly scarred with irregular knife marks.
“‘Now’ no longer exists. ‘Now’ has been shattered by fermented events,” he said. “After leaving, where will you go? What kind of awakening will you step into tomorrow?”
The old watchmaker’s anguished posture vanished as the candlelight died, swallowed by the vast blackness. His final voice, like a fragile autumn leaf, disappeared without a trace after the wind passed. His appearance and disappearance were droplets, unable to shake this indestructible city—a city destroying itself in its terminal illness. A fragment from the past or future flashed in my mind: after autumn, as the old watchmaker slept soundly in that shabby inn on the outskirts, I stood at the narrow vista’s end with a cold key, ready to lock the door of my apartment.
So I pushed through the crowd, climbed the stairs. Boarded the train to the suburbs, hesitated, but didn’t step back.
Dreams open their eyes
in the dark mist
Ah—the ruined wasteland
tears with sobs
the dream shattered
the tower collapsed
Closing my eyes, I felt the candle’s warmth. Through the window, I saw the river outside, twisting like a withered tree in the wind. By its banks stood an evergreen fir, dotted with wildflowers of gloomy hues. The morning sun, warm and bright, slanted in, casting sharp boundaries on the mottled room, leaving no room for confusion.
This is an illusion of reality, I murmured, catching the scent of distant memory.
I felt myself sitting in the room, on a rusty iron chair, leaning against a square table where a red candle stood. A knife, a lighter, a pocket watch, unnameable fragments. Across the table in the corner sat a girl with blurred features. Just as I thought this was a still painting, half-dreaming, she glanced at me and lit the candle with the lighter.
“So, have you made up your mind?” she said, looking at me. “Decisive, no retreat.”
The orange flame swayed at the candle’s tip, reminding me of volcanic lava. The stark light outside flooded every shadow in the room but couldn’t dispel the tar in the air. “It’s sunny now, the light’s bright,” I asked. “Why light a candle?” She stayed silent.
For a long time, neither of us spoke. She lowered her head, carving intricate grooves into the table with the knife. Those shocking marks made me think of the watchmaker’s wrinkles, or the river outside. I sat silently across from her, recording everything in my journal. To most, the girl behind the table was unremarkable, but she filled me with dread. Her eyes held an unnatural calm—or was it a fervor even the candlelight couldn’t pierce? I tried to find the story’s beginning but failed.
The girl kept carving the table, her hand slender, shadowed, impossibly long. Hands like hers couldn’t repair watches or wield hammers, but they could pluck out a heart like picking a silent mushroom. She didn’t notice my unease.
Suddenly, her hand slipped, the blade cutting skin. The journal fell. I half-rose, wanting to help or speak, but hesitated and stayed seated, watching her tend the wound herself. She sighed—or sobbed—and gazed at the shortening candle.
Tick, tick. The pocket watch’s gears turned. The candle had mostly burned, red wax dripping like eternal memory down the metal table, hardening on the steel floor. Then, faintly, I heard pages turning—a sound that appeared at fixed intervals, as if the world’s last objective thing. Soon, the scratch of a pen joined it.
“Who’s writing?” I muttered.
“You are,” she said, still carving, the knife creaking. “The ‘me’ across from you isn’t a person but a character in the journal. This house, that river, the clear sunlight—all fictional, existing only by the candle’s light.”
I fell silent, then asked, “Am I fictional too?”
She shook her head. She tried to speak but covered her mouth, kicked the table back, and stared at me. Her form wavered, shifting between heights and shapes, eluding my grasp.
The candle was nearly spent, deep as a shadow. I stood. “Now I remember. This is a cold winter night. I was revising the journal, drowsy, and fell asleep at the desk. A gale roared outside. I’m dreaming… Knowing it’s a dream, I’ll wake soon. Who are you? Why are you in my dream?”
Watching the dying flame, she spoke before I could react: “Now, this dream ends. I leave.” The candle’s last flicker tried to relight the world before the familiar inn swallowed me, but darkness struck. As in countless midnight panics, dread nearly shattered me. The watchmaker’s shadow flickered before me…
“Wait!” I reached out, but only grasped the cold chair—she was gone.
When sudden rain
falls on the world that named it
it slips through fingers
like a wave
then vanishes
I’ve never distinguished sky from sea. The blue hour’s vast gloom nearly swallowed me. The haze of waking hadn’t fully faded when the sound of coins hitting the ground filled my ears. Turning, I saw the person who’d slept against the train beside me had woken and joined the coin-tossing ritual for blessings.
The fireball rose instantly, lighting everything. In the skyscrapers, I’d never felt this—I’d thought the world was lit by man. Flustered, I flipped open the journal, desperate to record last night’s dream, even a fragment.
Free of the dome and artificial sun, my frail hand wrote the first new line: I’ve never distinguished sky from sea…
It rained.
I’d never been rained on. Absurdity struck—sky falling, sea swallowing. How?… Moments ago, dawn’s golden clarity had turned violent. The sun vanished, the path blurred behind me, the fresh writing smeared and shattered. Run, I thought, but heard no wind. Damned clouds—punishment for running away. Thunder, thunder! I stumbled like an ant lost in wet cement. Pulling free, I advanced. Trees grew around me, herding me down the lone path. A toad-like creature croaked: a stream. Wrong, wrong. A river, an ocean! Shaking hills, boiling waves, endless flight. Again, I saw intangible things in phosphorescent air. Sweating, hyperventilating, I thought myself a beast—but my fangs were broken, bones gnawed by ants, vultures circling the clouds. Crawling, I charged like demolition machinery…
Thud. I sat in a tiny ruin. The broken roof barely shielded me from rain, the dying light calming me. Unexpected nostalgia welled up.
Hesitation, resentment. Hesitation, grievance. I swallowed, amused at my refusal to retreat even drenched. The pocket watch ticked on, but a glance showed its hands frozen at sunrise, the numbers dissolving like the rain-smeared words. I’d cut free from time’s flow. Outside, the rain had quietly stopped, the newborn river flowing stubbornly onward, silent.
The vast river, surging west, rolling east…
Nodding, I stepped onto the water. The mirror showed an unfamiliar face—but I knew it was the young watchmaker. Behind him, an endless wall stood unshaken, barring the wilderness.
I reached to touch it. The wall… built of dark, wordless stone, metal rivets set in gray cement. My hand brushed the mirror, rippling vertically. I couldn’t name its texture but thought: time. Suddenly, the watch fell into water, the mirror shattered. Silence—true silence—for the first time. In the inn, under streetlights, by the tracks, noise never ceased. People laughed or sighed, machines climbed thick walls, endless artificial days draped the streets. Things bred in sewers; who knew what flew beyond aircraft? Even the vanished tenants of cheap apartments were part of the city’s norm. So my ears held roaring machines, white-clad figures with unconscious malice, no penalty but guilt. Hush, listen. Breath, footsteps. Trapped in the crowd, I couldn’t move, couldn’t stretch, couldn’t hide. My flailing hand spilled a bag of trifles, a mess of feathers and skin. No retreat, no retreat. So I stubbornly walked that solitary path. The white-clad were just workers—not special, not glorious, just ordinary. They dealt in logic, not emotion. Pragmatists! Realists! If hell was real, I’d rather revive the rotting watchmaker. Ha! How tragic, how unfortunate? Anger at futility, or hidden motives—what did I want? What should I do? The road forked in the woods. One path sunny, one untrodden—I looked up, the world beneath my feet invisible—thus deciding my life’s course. Time, come forth! Witness the shattered dream, the fallen tower, witness my ruin at this road’s end. My past, my ideals, my soul—all invisible.
I walked upstream.
YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE
YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE
YOU SHOULD (NOT) DECIDE
YOU MUST (NOT) BACK AWAY
At the wall’s base, the city’s edge, I met him—a white-clad figure without sunglasses. In the drizzle, still unsettled, I couldn’t even greet him.
“Good morning. Such heavy rain, yet you didn’t take a boat? Quite determined.” He stood by the flood, smiling.
I stayed silent, a phantom pain in my ribs.
He brushed his clothes, sat beside me, and said, “I fear people can’t recall the era before the city. It’s everywhere now—the world is only it. Open your eyes, and it’s there. Eat, and its molecules fill your mouth. Sleep, and you still breathe it. Like living nature, walking nature, the city is your only nature, your only eternity. Since you’re here, does that mean you’re lost, doubting even yourself?”
“Doubting myself?… Yes. ‘Now,’ ‘dreams,’ ‘rivers’—all excuses. But what can I do?” I replied bitterly. “If you want me to think independently, why are truths meaningless? If I must speak alone, why make me stammer? If I must live on, begging forgiveness, why does only death end suffering? Why can no one absolve me?…”
—I sing to the stars with my heart
“Then go to death. Since you’re so bitter, and nothing’s too costly.” He pointed behind me—to a half-open door.
—Cherish all dying life
No sorrow, no regret, no return. Self-doubt, exhaustion, scars. So I stood, raised my head, clenched my fists—not to strike, but to grit my teeth.
Laugh at me, laugh at me! Singing, I strode from the past, eyes fixed nowhere ahead.
—Still, I’ll set out on my own path
Approaching the city gate—always at the center of my vision—I brushed the rough cast iron. Burning pain made me flinch, but I frowned and gripped the handle. I couldn’t recall the watchmaker’s words, the train’s roar lingered but couldn’t be placed, the city’s faces blurred. Yes, I couldn’t record them all. If works reflect their creator’s soul, mine must be grotesque, stubborn, and wayward.
No matter. I wept, my sleeves too short to dry my tears. Exhaling the city’s air one last time, I pushed the scorching door open at the thorny road’s end.
—Tonight, the wind caresses the stars again
Into the wilderness.
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I live
only to find
what’s been lost
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End