岸上的陌生人/Stranger on the Shore I

老是做一個奇怪的夢, 因為故居在一個島上, 到市區去自然要乘船, 夢裡總是氣呼呼趕至碼頭時, 小輪船剛好拉過氣笛, 吐着濃煙冉冉離去, 這個夢的潛意識裡代表是什麼? 弗洛伊德和容格信徒又會作怎樣的心理分析? 準是沒有安全感之故, 怕錯過了, 實在又錯過些什麼? 去了還有下一班, 又趕着去哪兒呢?

而夢境又那麼清晰, 像看一幕電影凝止了的鏡頭, 畫面上一角‪由‬高漸低沉入海的山, 背景是溶在一起的天和水, 前景是空架在水上的碼頭, 小輪船漸行漸遠, 一個女子仍然站在碼頭上, 四裡無人, 只有她和她的瘦長的身影…
還有背景音樂呢, 是比利渥爾用西簫演奏的岸上的陌生人,
我在這兒站着, 看着潮水漸退, 是如此孤寂與落寞…

從小是個孤寂的孩子, 最愛下課後躲在校園一角看書, 在樹影婆娑下, 蟬鳴聲裡看完戰爭與和平, 悲慘世界, 水滸傳, 西遊記, 沉迷在書中的故事裡, 也不知道時日快過, 直至祖母喊叫吃晚飯, 才迷迷糊糊從情節裡走出來, 啊, 書中日月長...

—1995年2月1日發表在加京華報

There's a dream that always comes to me because my home was once an island. So whenever I had to go into the city, of course I had to catch the ferry. In this dream I'm racing to the ferry dock just as the small steamer sounds its whistle and pulls away in a cloud of smoke. What could my subconscious be trying to tell me? What mighta psychological analysis, in the vein of Freud or Jung, reveal? Perhaps I had no sense of security and feared missing everything. Yet what could I have possibly missed? There would be another ferry, and another, and besides, why was I in such a hurry? Where was I going?

The dream is so vivid, as vivid as watching a movie shrunken down, with the corner of the screen crushed into the sea by the immensity of the sky and mountains. In the background, the sky and waves dissolve together, and in the foreground is the empty dock, the ferry puttering off, its path aslant on the waves until it grows fainter and fainter. I see my own figure still standing on that dock, not a soul for miles, only a girl and her skinny shadow. Just as in a film, I hear the strains of Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore" in the background, the words welling up within me: "Here I stand/Watching the tide go out/So all alone and blue/ Just dreaming dream of you...

I was a solitary child. After school, I tucked myself away in some corner of the school yard, under the spreading branches of the shadow trees and the buzzing cicadas, to plunge into War and Peace, Les Misérables, Outlaws of the Marsh, or The Journey to the West, so lost in the story that I didn’t feel the day fly past until my grandmother called me for dinner. I came back out of the story, where the day had felt so long...

—published in winter 2019, Brick magazine