There is an Expiration Date to Each Dream

Today when I was walking down the stairs in my dorm building, one thought occurred to me that everyone’s dream has an expiration date though most don’t realize it before it’s too late.

There’s a time in my father’s younger days that his inner ambition was boiling, and the surrounding mediocrity must be stirring his blood. He made resolves and specific goals about his study; he wrote poems to express boiling emotions and thoughts; he wrote articles about current affairs, collected newspaper addresses, but never really had worked up enough courage and unabashedness dormant until the day I found one of his younger day notebooks.

I think he will never ever read them again. If he happen to come across one of them one day when delving into his cupboards, he will actually shake his head in dismiss and tuck them even deeper so there is no danger that anyone will ever find them.

I will never look back at my notebooks in high school, will I? Except when I purposefully want to experience the feeling of being hurt again. For my father, these notebooks are from a naive young man who knew nothing about life, so naive that he knew nothing about his destiny but was still making clumsy efforts finding a way out of that place he was born-the place I was still living in.

A generation later, we have still now made no difference. We are still what and where we were. Anyway, we will not look at these notebooks again. We know it will be somehow intriguing and exciting, but we won’t. It was a strange and mixed kind of feeling that I still can’t name.

As I was saying, there must be a time when his blood was stirred by mediocrity. And then there would be a time when he was wondering his future. Writer? Translator? Poet? But suddenly before he figured it out, the expiration date came upon him – too much too soon – before he realized it he still made some vain efforts for some more years.

Too much stories are still untold. But I have to hurry.