An aged child

At the edge of the desert, a peculiar young man was often seen sitting. People said he wasn’t quite right in the head, spending all day staring blankly at the vast yellow sands, as if waiting for something that would never come. The vendors in the market occasionally gossiped about him, saying his eyes were frighteningly old, set in a young face like two dried-up springs.

Whenever there was a festival in the city, lanterns and decorations would go up. Children, dressed in new clothes, chased each other through the streets holding candied figures, their laughter colliding in the air like strings of little bells. The young man would always stand in the farthest corner watching, a faint, almost mocking smile at the corner of his lips. His shadow stretched long in the setting sun, like a black crack separating him from the bustling crowd.

“You should go make some friends,” a well-meaning older woman once advised him. “What are friends?” he asked in return, his gaze drifting into the distance. “People you can laugh and play with.” “And after the laughing and playing?” The woman was speechless. She shook her head and left. He remained standing there, as if the question truly deserved deep thought.

During the fireworks display, everyone craned their necks, faces painted with colorful light. He alone looked down at the ground, counting grains of sand. A child squeezed through the crowd and handed him a freshly bought stick of cotton candy. “For you!” The child’s smile was brighter than the fireworks. He took the candy, thanked the child, but after the boy turned away, he planted the stick into a sand dune. The night wind soon scattered the sugary strands, like a miniature avalanche.

“Tomorrow will be better,” a passing schoolmaster recited to him. “Yesterday’s tomorrow is today,” he said, staring at the teacher’s shiny forehead. “Is today better than yesterday?” The schoolmaster frowned and quickened his pace.

Sometimes the wind would whip the sand into spirals, making faint sounds. At these moments, his eyes would suddenly widen, a ripple of something passing through their well-like depths. Others, thinking he had spotted something rare, would follow his gaze but see only the unchanging dance of yellow sand in the wind.

The old men in the teahouse said he hadn’t been like this as a child. Back then, he too could laugh, could fight with playmates over a piece of malt candy. What happened later, no one could clearly say. Just like no one could explain why he always murmured to his own shadow at high noon.

A seed merchant came to the market, hawking roses that could grow in the desert. Everyone treated it as a joke. Only he spent his entire savings on a handful. “Fool!” people laughed. Yet he solemnly buried the seeds in the sand, watering them on time every day, even putting up cloth canopies to shade them.

The seeds, of course, never sprouted. But whenever the wind blew over the dunes, he would still tilt his head and listen, as if amid the friction of countless sand grains he could discern a different rhythm—perhaps the sound of seeds struggling deep below, or perhaps just the beating of his own heart.

The caravan folks said that further west there were real oases, where flowers bloomed and springs ran sweet. Some urged him to go along. He shook his head. “What I’m waiting for is about to come,” he said. “If I leave, I’ll miss it.”

People gradually stopped trying to persuade him. He was like a stone in the desert, stubbornly staying in place, letting the wind and sand polish him. Children sometimes threw pebbles at him to see if he would get angry. But he never did. He would just watch them with those old eyes until they grew bored and ran away.

The midday sun compressed his shadow at his feet, small and black, like a shriveled fruit. He spoke to his shadow. The shadow didn’t speak back, only slowly lengthened as the sun shifted west. And so they conversed, day after day, one with words, the other with silence.

Flowers, of course, do not bloom in the desert. But that doesn’t stop someone from waiting. Just as the world is forever bustling, it doesn’t stop someone from stubbornly remaining alone.