I’ve never been a huge fan of popular music. The popularity itself isn’t the problem—there’s nothing wrong with many people liking a thing—but I’ve always felt like popular music was missing something. So what caught my attention about Guo Ding’s 2018 album The Silent Star Stone was a certain rawness and sincerity to it. The first song, “The Fog Space,” is a good rock song with interesting lyrics. The song tells a story of unrequited love and makes a poignant statement about how moving on isn’t the same as healing. The lyrics do a great job of creating an extended geographical metaphor to describe these feelings.

The first verse sets up our entry into a strange dreamland. It starts out with the narrator’s metaphor of being a restless river winding through a forest and into his lover’s heart, “never planning to stay.” While he’s here, he feels that he’s lost something, but the place is so beautiful that he can’t bring himself to leave. He sets up the chorus by recalling the outline of his lost lover “as the tide comes.” This image suggests how remembering her is an inevitable natural process that happens whether you want it to or not. Other references to natural cyclical phenomena appear in the second verse.

The pre-chorus then tells us what this strange dream actually looks like. He’s never seen the “flat [or gentle] hills,” a surreal choice of words to describe the unfamiliar serenity or love that he’s now experiencing in his dream. It’s beautiful, but it isn’t real. Even so, her heart is a “blooming/flowering bog,” a treacherous place—difficult to escape, but somehow beautiful. He wants to make contact, but perhaps fate or nature prevent him from reaching out.

The chorus brings us to the main action of his dream. He sees her and tests her gaze to see if she loves him, whereupon they embrace each other wholeheartedly. But it’s only his “gentle” dream, the reason he loves her in this “sad but beautiful place (淒美地 [qīmeǐ dì]).”

The second verse drives the story forward, describing “a careless message / lost in October / with no reply.” My interpretation of this is that our narrator has been ghosted after saying something he shouldn’t have. This reminds me of a similar line in The Beatles’ “Yesterday:” “I said something wrong / Now I long for yesterday,” expressing a similar irreconcilable regret.

With that over, it’s “a warm breeze and clear skies” now. But the best part of the song is the play on words that he makes next. He says “waiting for you to return again, the rain will have been over and I’ll have moved on.” The mention of rain is part of an idiom in Chinese, 雨過天晴 [yǔ guò tiān qíng], translated literally as “fair skies after a storm,” meaning that things get better after difficulties. But instead of 天晴 [tiān qíng], “clear skies,” he says 遷徙 [qiānxǐ], “migrate,” a strong seasonal word with a similar pronunciation. This small change upends the positive meaning of the phrase, replacing the healing with just “moving on.”

I love this subversion of expectations. The phrase plays in the key of nature like the rest of the lyrics, connecting the idea of rain to the tears of longing and the emotional scars which follow. It also ties back to a line from the first verse, where the river running into her heart is “never to return” (一去不回 [yīqù bùhuí]). Just like the changing of the seasons, or the ebb and flow of the tides, it can’t be helped. He can’t and won’t feel better; he’ll just move on. But “as night falls,” he’ll remember her again.

When we listen to the chorus for the second time, we now understand it from a new perspective. Time has passed, and he remembers the “flat hills” but is “stuck in the flowering marsh” (the fog space). The restless river has lost its momentum and gotten trapped in the bog. And as he imagines meeting his lost love again, it now seems farther away than ever, never to become reality. This is the mark of a good lyric. When a line is repeated, it should grow. It reminds me of what my college band director used to say: “Never play the same thing the same way twice.”

The bridge brings us to a new scene in his dream. They’re talking face-to-face, now, and he tells her not to say goodbye, since he can’t stand to part again. In this pivotal moment, he accepts that he’s trapped when he tells his love she doesn’t need to “comfort” him.

In this final chorus, we see a change. He no longer “tests her gaze,” but “holds it” as they embrace. As he finishes his story, he sums up his feeling: “so out of reach / so beyond belief / let me fall / in this sad but beautiful place.” He knows this dream will never come true and decides to let himself drown in it, an almost macabre sort of acceptance.

I like this song for several reasons. Aside from the catchy tune, I can identify with the story it tells. Decisions, non-decisions—they can build up to a mountain of regrets, terrible but beautiful. They’re set in stone, and nothing but utter disaster can wipe them away.

To wrap up, this song does a great job of using natural imagery in an extended metaphor to describe lost love as a wild and beautiful place that’s hard to escape. What really hit me is the difference between moving on and healing—that simple play on words is a fulcrum that adds real weight to the song. That’s what great songs do.