喵喵

Sometimes I really doubt whether there is love between my parents. Every day they are very busy trying to earn money in order to pay the high tuition for my brother and me. They don’t act in the romantic ways that I read in books or I see on TV. In their opinion, “I love you” is too luxurious for them to say. Sending flowers to each other on Valentine’s Day is even more out of the question. Finally my father has a bad temper. When he’s very tired from the hard work, it is easy for him to lose his temper.

One day, my mother was sewing a quilt. I silently sat down beside her and looked at her.

“Mom, I have a question to ask you,” I said after a while.

“What?” she replied, still doing her work.

“Is there love between you and Dad?” I asked her in a very low voice.

My mother stopped her work and raised her head with surprise in her eyes. She didn’t answer immediately. Then she bowed her head and continued to sew the quilt.

I was very worried because I thought I had hurt her. I was in a great embarrassment and I didn’t know what I should do. But at last I heard my mother say the following words:

“Susan,” she said thoughtfully, “Look at this thread. Sometimes it appears, but most of it disappears in the quilt. The thread really makes the quilt strong and durable. If life is a quilt, then love should be a thread. It can hardly be seen anywhere or anytime, but it’s really there. Love is inside.”

I listened carefully but I couldn’t understand her until the next spring. At that time, my father suddenly got sick seriously. My mother had to stay with him in the hospital for a month. When they returned from the hospital, they both looked very pale. It seemed both of them had had a serious illness.

After they were back, every day in the morning and dusk, my mother helped my father walk slowly on the country road. My father had never been so gentle. It seemed they were the most harmonious couple. Along the country road, there were many beautiful flowers, green grass and trees. The sun gently glistened through the leaves. All of these made up the most beautiful picture in the world.

The doctor had said my father would recover in two months. But after two months he still couldn’t walk by himself. All of us were worried about him.

“Dad, how are you feeling now?” I asked him one day.

“Susan, don’t worry about me.” he said gently. “To tell you the truth, I just like walking with your mom. I like this kind of life.” Reading his eyes, I know he loves my mother deeply.

Once I thought love meant flowers, gifts and sweet kisses. But from this experience, I understand that love is just a thread in the quilt of our life. Love is inside, making life strong and warm..

When things start to hurt, they always say that the time is the best healer but they lie. Time is not a friend that heals all wounds; it is the enemy that ravages and murders youth.

Youth is so vulnerable! With fresh, young face and bright smiles, you were eager to start your life. You thought the future would be rich and colourful. You believed in love, and dreamt one day Mr./Mrs. Right would show up to make your life complete. You refused to regard yourself as someone whose whole life would be tired to a series of monotonous and uncreative jobs.

Certainly you would be different, because you were the chosen one, sooner or later, you would stand out of the rest and become someone really special. The seasons came and went, and each season brought a new portion of reality to you. Day after day, routine hard work in a small office have taken up most of your time, and left little room for surprises in life. You began to accept the idea of drifting along like this. Out and in of the relationships, you were taught that break up would never be the end of world. And the person you desperately clung to perhaps would not be the one you loved. It was the fear of being along.

This could never be a pleasant process of growing up. This time you got hurt, and you would learn how to defend yourself next time. The critical truth is, the more you learn to protect yourself, the little you get hurt, and, the harder you could get happy. So you see, time is really not the healer because the wounds are still there. It’s the youth that being killed. Each succeeding year had left its own mark upon you, a kind of hardness, like the annual rings of the tree.

 Until one day, part of your heart became cemented and refused to open to anybody. The feeling of hurt had gradually disappeared and been replaced by a feeling of coldness and emptiness. You looked in the mirror and received Time’s message:" The youth is murdered."

Seeing your own reflection, you found small wrinkles near the edges of your eyes and deeper cynical hard lines ran from your face. Perhapse there would be still traces of the fresh young person who was so vulnerable and so sensitive, who would cry for a tiny failure he made, who would lay awake waiting for someone special’s phone call, or would got drunk several days when a relationship was over. And you would realize how desperately you would miss that person.