anemoia (n.)
nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

༻❁༺

We lay, my love and I
Beneath the weeping willow

We buried Lê Xuân Tú - or what was left of him - beneath a weeping willow.

I was not sure what I really expected, entering that house at a freezing winter dawn. Maybe the cold and the humming of the wind had played trick on me, coating me in so many layers of memories that for a moment I thought time had relapsed right back at that split second when I saw him for the first time, wandering among the four white walls, already silent and haunting as a ghost.

Now that he was here, literally decomposing in his tailored casket, white bones occasionally protruding out of the body and face barely recognizable, I found myself wondering where his ghost had gone after all those years.

But now alone I lie
And weep beside the tree

Not a single name was uttered - was allowed to be uttered - among those white walls. In that house, all faces became faceless, all names became nameless, and all souls and hearts and loves and sorrows vanished into nothingness.

We walked around the house, trying not to disturb anything. I revisited the room under the stairs where I had recovered from the long journey out of the quarantine zone. The smell of mothballs still wafted through the air, and on the table across from the bed was still the picture frame I had broken. If the lighting in that room was not affected, I think the colors on the photo - and the smiles they marked - had faded away a little.

"Is this..." Hoang Duc came to hug me and asked me in a whisper.

"Don't." I leaned back, lightly touching my index finger to his lips to signal him to be quiet. "Don't awaken the ghosts."

Singing 'o willow waly'
By the tree that weeps with me

I thought Xuân Tú had always known that I would come back to find him. Or maybe not. Anyway, he had expected it to happen. The message placed in the middle of that withered forest flower wreath, could it be for anyone but me - the only person alive who knew about this place?

Apparently, even until I carefully placed his casket into the grave, I was still unable to understand him. And yet, somehow, he always saw right through me. Before his eyes, I was shunned, surrounded and melted, all my thoughts and desires and hopes and instincts exposed, nothing could be hidden.

Perhaps he was still watching me, from beyond the grave. At times I had to stop to check my breath, see if he had taken even that from me.

Singing 'o willow waly'
Till my lover returns to me

But when I leaned down to touch the cold soil, something strange happened.

Images flashed before my eyes. Things I immediately recognized as my own memories. The early winter mornings when fog covered the peaks of the mountains. The sound of birds calling their flocks at sundowns. But also things I was sure that I had never seen before. A suburb strangely familiar. An inn with a musty smell. Green grass, weeping willows, hands tying up willow branches into a wreath and playfully putting it on my head. Voices of people talking. A sunlit patio. A gentle smile and crow's feet eyes. Fingers gliding over piano keys in a large concert hall. Intense loneliness intertwined with every passing second.

When I got out of those images, I found myself sitting on the ground, tears rolling down my cheeks. And Hoàng Đức was hugging me, gently patting me like a child.

I knelt and crawled over to the grave that I had just finished covering. I placed my hands on the ground, returned the memories to the body lying beneath, and whispered one last time to him, "Sleep. Go to sleep, my love."

A broken heart have I
O willow I die, o willow I die...