"My heart is like a canoe, the vision is out of sight, but it is still moving forward." - In the vast wilderness of Proust's "Reminiscence of the Time Like Water" , a father and daughter riding bicycles came from a distance. His father was in his thirties. He was dressed in a long coat, and his thick figure seemed to have the elegance of an intellectual and the perseverance of an adventurer.
The daughter is too young and walks side by side with her father. Seen from the side, her small body is hidden from her father's side, and only a small wheel is running side by side with her father's wheel. The wheels, one big and one small, are like the growth rings of two trees, with countless years between father and daughter between them.
They walked quietly without saying a word. After driving over a slope, they got onto a river.
It was clearly a sunny day, and rolling white clouds spread across the sky like rolling hills. But this picture is gray in my daughter's memory. She didn't know where her father took her, but she had an inexplicable excitement in her heart. She tried hard to keep up with her father's speed, and then she actually walked in front of her father. It was not until she turned around that she found that her father had stopped by two big trees on the edge of the river.
She turned around and got out of the car, bouncing to her father's side. The father crouched down, said a few short words in his daughter's ear, and walked towards the river. A small canoe was docked on the shore, undulating with the waves.
The moment he got on the boat, the father suddenly turned around, ran back to his daughter, lifted her up high, hugged her tightly, and put it down reluctantly, like a final farewell.
The daughter remembers that when her father left, he turned his back to the distance and his face to himself, rocking the oars alone and firmly, sailing deep into the river, until he disappeared into the distant horizon.
The daughter waited anxiously on the river bank for a long time, and the small figure ran back and forth on the river bank, like an abandoned baby bird. However, until it was getting late, the father still did not return.
At this time the next day, the daughter came to the river alone. Father's bicycle was still leaning there, but the river was empty, and no one returned, as if no one had ever left.
Winter has gone to spring, and many years have passed in a flash. Every evening, the daughter will go to the place where her father left and wait for her father to return. Sometimes through strong winds, sometimes in heavy rain. She is most afraid of windy and rainy weather, not because it is particularly difficult to go to the river in such weather, but because the undulating river surface makes her worry about her father in the distance.
In the beginning, she will be disappointed. Later, waiting became a habit. She vaguely understood that her father might not come back, but she would not give up waiting, because that would mean giving up hope that her father would come back. She was unwilling to give up this hope. She felt that as long as she did not give up waiting, her father would still be alive.
Sometimes when passing there, she would stop and stare blankly at the calm river surface, thinking in her heart that her father would row the little wooden boat and sail from the horizon.
During this waiting, the daughter grew up from a little girl at the beginning to a beautiful girl. Later, her lover was also accompanied by her to watch by the river. When their father left, they also had a pair of children beside them. The children do not know why their parents go to the river every day, but they are also happy to go to the river with their parents to play for a while.
The daughter spent her long life in waiting. On this day, she was old and staggering, and it took some effort to get to the river. Recently, she felt that her hands and feet were a little out of control. She put the bicycle three times and failed to stop. When she fell down for the last time, she finally gave up her plan to get up again.
Maybe it will never be used again. she thinks.
Thinking of this, she suddenly realized that maybe this is the last time to wait for the news of her father's return. Over the years, she has always remembered the words her father said to her when he was leaving: "Here, wait for me to come back." Because of this sentence, she always felt that she had an agreement with her father. He used his whole life to keep his promise, did his father forget the agreement between them?
With that in mind, I walked to the river bank. I don't know when, the river began to dry up, and two dead trees stood there alone, engraved with the imprint of my father's departure from here.
She suddenly felt that a mysterious force was calling her. Following this call, she walked through the soft sand and deep into the river. She saw, among the dead grass, her father's little canoe laying there quietly, leaning, with a thick layer of silt accumulated in the boat.
The daughter walked over slowly, stroking the withered canoe. She was not sad or grieving in her heart, she just felt that, in her whole life, she finally found news about her father. At this moment, she and her father had a subtle telepathy.
She understood why she felt that her father had not left, because he had been sleeping with his little canoe at the bottom of the river in front of her.
Involuntarily, the daughter stepped into the canoe and slowly lay down on her side. In the small space that could only accommodate one person, she seemed to smell the scent of her father; the soft sand under her body seemed to still have the residual warmth left by her father.
She closed her eyes and felt her father's breath. In a trance, she seemed to feel her father walking towards her. She got up and ran in the direction of her father. She felt that her footsteps became light, as if she was traveling through a time-space tunnel, returning from an old man with white temples to the original little girl, and threw herself into her father's warm arms...
This story comes from Michael Dudewitt's animated short "Father and Daughter", which uses 13 minutes to tell a daughter's watch and waiting for her father's life. There is no line or narration in the whole film, just like a poem that cannot be translated. It is interpreted with silent pictures. There is a kind of waiting that can die.
View more about Father and Daughter reviews
