🔙 ## 那棵老槐树 ⚙️

The sun dips low, a molten coin, sinking into the amethyst sea. Its final rays, fractured and scattered, paint the clouds with strokes of fiery orange and bruised plum. The air, still warm from the day's embrace, carries the scent of salt and distant woodsmoke, a whisper of forgotten fires.

A lone gull cries, a mournful, lonely sound that echoes the emptiness blooming in my heart. It’s a vast, echoing emptiness, not unkind, but filled with a quiet understanding of the ephemeral nature of things. The fleeting beauty of a sunset, the delicate dance of a leaf falling from its branch, the brief, incandescent flame of a life lived.I walk along the shore, the wet sand cool beneath my feet, each grain a tiny universe of its own, holding stories untold. The tide whispers secrets to the shore, secrets lost to the relentless rhythm of the waves. Each surge forward, a claim; each retreat, a surrender. It’s a dance as ancient as time itself, a dance of creation and destruction, a constant ebb and flow mirroring the tides within us.The moon, a silver sickle in the darkening sky, casts a long, shimmering path across the water. It's a path I long to follow, a path that leads to somewhere unknown, somewhere beyond the reach of sorrow and the sting of loss. But the path is an illusion, a trick of the light, as ephemeral as the echoes of laughter carried on the wind.The stars begin to prick the velvet canvas of the night, tiny diamonds scattered across an endless expanse. They are a reminder of the vastness of the universe, a universe indifferent to our joys and our sorrows, our triumphs and our failures. Yet, in that indifference, there is a certain comfort, a quiet acceptance of the inevitable.The echoes of the day fade, leaving only the whisper of the waves and the silent vigil of the stars. And in that silence, I find a strange solace, a quiet peace in the knowledge that even the most beautiful things must eventually fade, leaving behind only their memory, their ephemeral echoes. And sometimes, those echoes are enough.