长河

It recognizes me. When I was a child, I crouched on the stone steps to wash my feet, and it licked my soles—cool, tingling, playful. Now, when I dip my lens into the water, it still knows me—those ripples are its fingerprints, and in its murky depths lie secrets it has kept for years.

What drifts downstream isn’t just branches. Sometimes, it’s half a blue brick, a split gourd, or an occasional paper boat, its sails stubbornly intact even as it soaks apart. They don’t speak, but I understand—this is the river passing me messages. It remembers everyone it has ever carried away.

The old willow at the ferry was cut down, the concrete embankments straightened. But when the tide rises at night, I swear I still see the water ghosts tying their ropes in the same spots. Their damp hair tangles with weeds, their fingernails caked with silt from thirty years ago.

What I capture isn’t just the river—it’s the mist of its breath. Those shimmering reflections trembling in the frame? That’s the river, blinking.