when i left his apartment that day, i walked down three sets of dusty click-lit steps. then through a shaded hallway with dripping floors and down a stone staircase. he must have been behind me but i couldn't hear him through the roars of my luggage wheels. i waved to the gateman, who for once was not slumbering, and stepped outside the gates to greet a busy morning street.

so, so different from that one quiet summer dawn, when i woke up at 5 am to walk with him to the town's edge and the haze had faded everything to cold neutral and i couldn't believe how small his town was to be surrounded by such endless cloud-wreathed mountains. and we had both kept silent in comfortable companionship in what seemed like a suspended place and time.

but that day, as i was leaving for the final time, everything was as i came: people, buses, cars in never-ending traffic cacophony, like a million jeweled bugs gone crazy in the sun and humidity. i closed my eyes and time folded, how could two months stand between two identical settings, and then it quickened to spite me: he stepping to my side and yelling down a cab. and i putting the suitcase in the trunk and shut. there was just a moment before i closed the door and waved goodbye.

on some hot summer days, on some street corners, if i'm lucky, if the heat and gasoline smells and car honks mix just right, i would recapture that moment of splitting between his world and mine. i wanted to hug him, an altogether foreign and modern gesture (so i didn't). i wanted to tell him, tactlessly, 爷爷，我永远爱你 (but i just nodded and smiled weakly). time waits for no one, a lesson i need relearning and can only remember in desperation. remember: my body dragging my heart into the car; in the back window, seeing his small figure disappearing into the crowd.