Fish Flower - Cai Peixuan

I was moved to tears by a song just now, and I felt so vulnerable that I had to share it. It's 'Fish Flower' by Cai Peixuan. Few songs make your eyes well up from the very first notes of the intro. What captivated me most about this song is the imagery of 'Fish Flower' – a school of fish swimming past the surface, leaving ripples like flowers, beautiful but fleeting, destined not to stay. The love in the lyrics is also like this water. 'My heart becomes a river of tears, for you to dwell within,' turning longing into a river, even willing to let the other person reside there. 'The furthest distance is to be close to your heart,' lightly expresses the deepest regret in the song: what's truly distant isn't always space, but the inability to reach each other's hearts despite being so close. My favorite line is 'Leaving a letter, floating in the wandering river.' Some words are ultimately left unsaid, only to be written down and let drift away. Like the fish flower, it appeared once, it was so beautiful once, but it could only slowly dissipate with the current. It's only with the final line, 'Never managed to swim to you,' that the entire song truly sinks in. It turns out some loves didn't fail to happen, but rather, they never managed to swim to the other person's side. And those unreached loves eventually become circles upon circles of ripples in the heart.