La Vie de Chrysante

Her laughter rang out softly in the cool night air, punc­tu­ated only by the sounds of smooth foot­steps against the path of con­crete that lay beneath them, slowly guiding—guiding impromptu hunters to their quarry: a red car. With a flam­boy­ant ges­ture, she presen­ted it to him, watch­ing the sur­prise unfold from his eyes; he did not show much emotion—stoic, stable, steady, the out­rageous­ness of the situ­ation caused a chuckle and a remark to escape as they breath­lessly slid into the seats that awaited them, fin­gers deftly pulling buckles into slots and pla­cing keys into slots, keys that would close doors and open roofs so that the sky was their ceiling—the sky. The sky was the only call they answered. The sky was the only mas­ter that they fol­lowed. The sky was the only per­form­ance they heeded.

Wind that once merely shook a curl from her hair or bat­ted at his eyes now became anim­ated, became breath­ing, became a creature— a creature that was now alive, filled with energy, filled with strength, filled with emo­tion. It wove its way though their exposed limbs and heads, cool­ing, chilling, freezing—freezing their expres­sions of joy at its tick­ling. The clock shin­ing a bright 3:27 did noth­ing to them. The sign announ­cing that it was 63 above did not affect them. The strains of Debussy, Holst, and Mouret eman­at­ing from the speak­ers, so unchar­ac­ter­istic to their age and tem­pera­ment, did not faze them. The stat­ist­ics that sur­roun­ded their area, where edu­ca­tion did not even deserve a single whole digit and crime deman­ded mul­tiple fig­ures, did not scare them. They were young. They were reck­less. They were drunk on life. For them, all what mattered was the simple idea that they were free—free to think, to ima­gine, to dream.

A dog’s bark amid the water’s sound—Peach blos­som that’s made thicker by the rain. Deep in the trees, I some­times see a deer, and at the stream I hear no noonday bell. Wild bam­boo divides the green mist—A fly­ing spring hangs from the jasper peak. No-one knows the place to which he’s gone—Sadly, I lean on two or three pines.

—Li Bai, “Vis­it­ing the Taoist Priest Dai Tian­shan But Not Find­ing Him”