雨中岁月

I am not so sure if I can express this explicitly. 雨中岁月, in all its profoundness, was coined while I was hospitalised two weeks ago. A week in isolation and a week of rain do invoke a share of the bitterness of the bygone years. I don’t know if this is just me but rainy days have often, and for most of the time, been successful in opening the gap of nostalgia. More so, when I am about the face an impending change in my life and I have yet the fully comprehend the consequences.

With each patter of the rain onto the window’s glass, lies a sense of lingering thoughts silently creeping within the mind. Yes, it was yesterday when we may have nothing and yet we had everything. Life’s little parcels of subtlety dawns onto us, something we cannot measure materially. I still remember, as a child, looking into the cold dawn sky and awaiting/hoping for the morning rain to come. For it was only when it rains that mum will stay at home and make us Yong Tauhu and other delicacies. Naively, and it hadn’t occurred to me then, I had harboured the thoughts of rain coming everyday. Mum was paid a measly wage, not even a salary, so to speak.

We may laugh at it now, how life’s little offerings then can brings bundles of savouring joys and happiness as we joked around the dining table with seemingly idiotic topics. We were too young to understand behind these family’s joys lied the reality of worries my parents had to endure and the patience to see us grow up sensibly. I guess the rains of yesteryears may have covered the tears of unhappiness in their eyes. Or, we are simply too young to tell the differences.

As the years rolled on, I tend to have a newer perception of rain. Rain doesn’t pour in the UK; it simple drizzles helplessly through the day. Being nostalgic was never on the agenda as the priority is to complete the university life and get on with life. I see rain as something emphatically a fact of life there and we can do nothing about it. Perhaps, this was the reason why the years in UK were virtually blank within my memory bank. There are people, some simply flashed by, some still in acquaintances, nonchalantly chatting enthusiastically about the university’s life after 20 odd years. I just cannot figure out the thrills and funs within the vacuum of my university years, although I did have a lengthy one.

Today I may seemingly have almost everything and yet I still have nothing. You may say I am drooling melancholy into the rhythm of this rainy night. You may even say I am not willing to face the ironic truth and twist in life. But I have come so far and yet I still feel the sense of sadness with every step I take. The years have left me even deeper in loss however much the material world may have so generously bestowed onto my life. Material gains are never important in my journey of life and yet is being sought blindly by someone once closed to me. I can only say “雨中岁月留给我更深的迷惘”. My only consolation is, life is only as meaningful as you want it to be. Perhaps a rhapsody in the rain may, at times, camouflage the tears of life’s deeper puzzles.

Happy 51st Birthday to myself, amidst the profoundness of this pouring night.