The loquat tree

The person you think about at two in the morning never comes up in daylight.

You have meetings, you order food, you answer messages quickly. Then the lamp goes off and a sentence somebody said in 2019 arrives and stays for an hour.

Gui Youguang wrote a short piece about a study he grew up in. It was tiny, he said, a hundred years old, and it leaked. He wrote about his grandmother, who once leaned on the door with a tablet in her hand and said, this child of my family took forever to appear.

He wrote about his mother, who came by at night and asked whether he was cold, and how the servant girls would repeat it the next day and cry.

Then he wrote about his wife. She came into the family and they lived there for six years. She used to lean on the desk and learn to write characters. When she died, the loquat tree in the courtyard, the one she planted with her own hands the year she arrived, was already spreading out. Now, he says, it stands as tall as an umbrella.

That's the last line. He doesn't say he misses her. There's no summary. Only a tree, and how big it has grown.

Almost everything you remember attaches to something that has lost its owner. A tree. A jacket nobody wears. A mug in the wrong cupboard.

If it comes back to you tonight, it can just be there. You don't have to move it.

MOJOWAY holds the things you'd otherwise leave unsaid until they attach themselves to furniture. Naming what you're carrying is the part of self-awareness nobody does out loud.