New life layers over old days, like forgetting to advance the roll on a film camera. New images stack frame by frame, faintly, onto present impressions. Dejavu must come from paths once walked, scenes once seen, half-reluctantly spliced into a new landscape — and so you are forced forward.
I was sitting by the third-floor window of No. 22 on the Bund, looking out at the river view across the bank, when a scene suddenly surfaced in my mind: the first week after I arrived in London, walking along the opposite bank of Westminster with a boy from Fujian. I had just arrived in the UK; he had one week left. We met on different trajectories, at different stages of life. I still remember how we picked a bench facing the river and sat for a while. The heavy, overcast sky began to release a fine, fine, mist-like rain.
We both had umbrellas. But by unspoken agreement, neither of us opened one. After a while, my eyelashes were covered in tiny beads of rain. We exchanged contact info later, kept chatting on and off for a while, then gradually lost touch after he left. It wasn't until very recently — when I re-downloaded WeChat and set foot in China — that I suddenly remembered that rain-soaked conversation by the river.
Later, much later, after returning to Taipei from Shanghai, I deleted him from my WeChat contacts too. But I still remember the deep bronze bench we sat on, with a nameplate on the backrest dedicated to someone who had passed — though I can't recall the name anymore. I only remember that the nameplate, too, was dotted with one transparent droplet after another.
I did, in the end, move forward.