Lanterns for the Unreturning

The Invocation

To the one whose voice was once the wind through bamboo,

I write by oillight, though the wick is old and the flame pulls toward the open window. Outside, the plum trees bend under spring’s last chill, and the paper screens tremble as if remembering you. I know you will not read this. Perhaps you no longer walk this world. Perhaps you live, and have forgotten me. But I have not forgotten you.

Memory does not ask permission. Grief has no need of answers.

In dreams I call your name, but I speak it as if through silk, muffled, soft, unstitching with each syllable. So I do not send this letter. I only write it, as one might draw water from a well that will never be emptied. My hand shakes. The ink blurs. I write because the silence has grown too loud.

If this letter survives me, let it be a lantern to float across the river of years. Let it find you, wherever time has carried your name.

You left before the red leaves fell that year. And though so many seasons have returned, you have not. I no longer count them. Time has turned to mist in my chest.

But when I remember you, the days return, unwrinkled by years. In memory, nothing fades. In memory, you are still reaching for my sleeve.

This is me, unfolding it back to you.

Memory in Bloom

Do you remember the jasmine path behind the old zelkova tree? The one that curved just enough to hide us from the courtyard walls. We sat there once when the rain paused, your sleeves still damp, my braid coming loose, and the clouds hanging like thoughts that did not know how to speak.

You picked a flower that had fallen, not yet bruised, and said its scent was too brief to be written down. I told you that even a single petal, pressed between pages, could outlast our names. You laughed, not because it was untrue, but because it was something I would say.

I think of that day often, though I have learned not to chase it. It rises unbidden, like mist from a shallow lake, present only when the sun forgets to burn.

You placed a poem in my hand before you left. Folded without a crease, written in that careful brush of yours that always seemed unsure whether it wished to speak or stay silent. I read it once, then again, then again until I could see it with my eyes closed. It begins to fade now, the ink a river in retreat. But the words remain. They do not leave me.

You never said goodbye. You looked back, and that was all.

I stood in the courtyard long after your footsteps vanished. The lanterns were being lit for the harvest prayers. Someone was singing in the neighbor’s house, a song too old to carry words. The moon was low and red. I remember thinking it looked like the lid of an urn.

That night, I lit a candle and placed it near the poem. It flickered once, then settled. I watched the flame and wondered if it would last until morning.

It did.

But you did not return.

So I kept the page. And perhaps, one day, someone else will unfold it, and see what once lived between the lines.

The War Outside the Garden

The village changed in quiet ways. At first it was only the colors. Robes became plain, voices sharper. The old couple who used to chant sutras in the tea shop disappeared. In their place came men with books written in strange, righteous lines, who spoke of kingdoms built by heaven’s law and not by time.

They called it salvation. They called it light.

But I only saw smoke.

I listened to their sermons through the window slats. Their words had fire but no water. They burned through Confucius, through Laozi, through the poems carved on stone at the temple gate. The old gods had no place in their new city of ash. We were told that filial piety was a crutch, that harmony was weakness, and that heaven had appointed a new son, born not from dynasties, but from thunder.

I never spoke. What was there to say? I swept the floors of my mother’s house and watched strangers grow familiar with our soil.

Your letters stopped after the borders shifted. I imagined them confiscated, read by men who saw ink as threat. I do not blame you. I believe you still wrote. I believe your words are lost in a pile of confiscated pages, pressed flat under someone’s boot.

If these pages should one day find your eyes, know this: I never stopped waiting for your words. Even in silence, I listened.

Perhaps you served, not for their cause, but for survival. Or perhaps you believed what they said, that a new world could be born from a broken one.

I only know that the jasmine fields did not return that year. The roots rotted in their beds. The blossoms did not bloom. My mother said it was blight. But I believed the earth knew better than we did. That it mourned in ways we had forgotten how to see.

Some nights I would walk to the old path and leave a bowl of water at the base of the tree. I do not know if it was for you, or for the girl I was before the drums arrived. Either way, it was an offering.

Not to gods.

To memory.

A Woman’s Quiet Grief

They never asked me what I believed. Women were expected to carry water, not questions. So I kept my thoughts folded, like cloth no longer worn but too delicate to discard.

The days passed in routines that barely touched the surface of time. I lit incense for ancestors who would not recognize this world. I boiled water for tea I did not drink. I mended robes that no longer fit anyone. I watched the wind pass through the rice paper screens and envied its freedom.

There were rumors, of course. That you had died. That you had married. That you had written a song so sorrowful it made even the Heavenly King weep. I believed none of them. I believed all of them. Grief, I have learned, is a garden that grows without tending. You do not need to feed it. It finds its own roots.

I dreamed once that I saw you standing in the temple ruins, your hair streaked with ash, your hands full of broken inkstones. You said nothing. But your eyes held the weight of every word you never sent.

I woke with your name in my mouth. It was still warm.

There is no altar for the love that waits without being asked. No prayers for the ones who keep quiet so others may shout.

But still, I wrote. One letter. Then another. Not to be sent, only to be remembered. Paper does not ask who reads it. Ink does not mind being unread. I pressed them between the folds of my robe like herbs for a fever that would not pass.

Perhaps one day, someone will unfold them and find your name inside.

If memory is a kind of body, then mine carries your absence like breath.

The Present: Cracked Light, Withered Hands

Tonight the candle flickers more than usual. The oil is nearly gone, and I must tilt the dish to keep the light from sinking. My hands are slower now. They no longer follow thought the way they once did. I dip the brush and wait for the bristles to remember their shape.

Outside, the plum blossoms have fallen. The garden smells of earth and wind. The neighbor’s child sings softly while gathering fallen leaves. She does not know the names carved into the tree roots. The world has grown new eyes, and none of them look back.

I no longer live in the house where we met. That roof collapsed three winters ago. The new one is low and crooked, like a back bowed with age. But I keep the window facing west, where the river glints in late light and the lanterns once floated for the dead.

Each year, I light one. Not for ancestors, but for you. I write a wish on rice paper and fold it into the frame. Most drift no farther than the reeds. Some vanish entirely. Perhaps the river keeps them. Perhaps it carries them to places we cannot name.

Tonight, I do not light a lantern.

I have written too much. And still, nothing has changed. You remain where I last imagined you. Still walking. Still turning back without speaking. Still folding your poem like a farewell you could not say aloud.

I place this letter beside the candle. The page curls at the edges, as if listening. There is no one left to read it. And yet I write.

Because to write is to breathe when the breath has no echo.

If you ever find this, if these words survive wind, and rot, and all the forgetting that time demands, then let them be a mirror. Not of my face, but of your own, once reflected in my eyes.

That would be enough.

If time forgets me, let this remember for me.

The Farewell and the Lantern

I have folded this letter the way you once folded your poem. Not to hide it, but to keep it warm. The creases hold a kind of rhythm, like breath paused between thoughts. The ink is dry now. The brush sleeps in its bowl. The candle leans, but does not fall.

I place the letter inside the lantern. The frame is thin, bent slightly from last year’s rain. Its paper is soft as old skin, and carries the scent of ash and plum wood. There is a string, but no flame.

I do not light it.

There is a kind of mercy in keeping something still. A wish unburned does not vanish. It becomes the air we breathe, the silence between one step and the next.

If I lit it, the wind might carry it to the river, or the fire might consume it before it rose. Either way, it would leave me.

But I have already lost too much.

So I will keep it here, on the windowsill where the sun finds it in the late hours. Perhaps someone will see it and wonder. Perhaps they will open it, and your name will rise like the scent of jasmine after rain.

Or perhaps not.

Some things do not need to be seen to endure.

I do not know what you became, or whether you walked beyond this world or only beyond me. But I know what you were, and what you carried in your hands when the world was young and uncertain.

And I know this:

To love is to wait for a voice you may never hear again.

To love is to light a lantern, and choose not to send it.

But still, it waits to be found.

落笔成灰情未尽，

无声灯火照余心。

Though the brush fades to ash, my feeling is not gone,

A silent lantern still lights what remains of my heart.