Mr. and Mrs. Smith

There is a line in the hot movie "No Questions Asked" in the previous paragraph: If you know in advance the life you are facing, do you still have the courage to come?

Although on some level, this problem seems meaningless, anyone who comes to the world is not a choice they can make, in the short journey of life, there are very few projects for them to choose, and these projects may even be single-choice topics for a lifetime at some times, such as marriage, career, and children. It seems that no matter how much cherishing and effort, can not avoid regrets, how to go in life is a process of constantly missing and losing, but the number and size of regrets vary from person to person, and feelings will be very different...

As big as an era, as small as a personal destiny, everyone's story will be different. Before meeting Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I remembered them firmly, not only because this surname is like the Lao Wang family in China, but also because there is a movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", played by my idols Pete and Julie, plus the plot of the film is also very special, it is difficult to forget. I have also heard many of their stories, for example, they fell in love for each other for the first time, they began to fall in love in high school, and then they cultivated positive results, and then they loved each other for more than fifty years, and then they achieved the leading position in the real estate industry in our small city with their own efforts, and they were very enthusiastic about public welfare undertakings and so on.

I harvested these stories in batches, but every time my expression was absolutely the same, I couldn't find the right words to express my feelings except to express my amazement, although my heart was turning over the river. Everything about the Smiths seemed to me to me to be a combination of legends. If they live in our country at this age, the story will not have the current version no matter how it is flipped, in memory, our country once had the custom of early marriage, and late marriage was advocated, but love and feelings seemed to have always been a flood beast, and the era of early marriage was the word of the matchmaker, the fate of the parents. The years of late marriage are more decided and arranged by the organization. Finally, when it comes to bold and free love, early love must also be ruthlessly snuffed out. Even if you don't fall in love early, the probability of your first love being successfully married is minimal.

And the Smiths are not only the beginning of the legend, but also continue the legend all the way, but also started from scratch, founded their own business, and loved for more than fifty years, these superpositions together have long surpassed the fairy tale level to the myth. And because of my friendship, I have also had some contact with them very closely. Everything is not much different from what you imagined, and it can be said that there is no distance from what you imagined. They are radiant, not at all inferior to the style of young people, well-dressed, kind and enthusiastic and talkative, really the male and female protagonists who come out of the movie pictorial, everything is so flawless.

That summer, when I learned that I had the opportunity to spend a short vacation with them and would visit one of their private homes, I was nowhere near enough to describe my feelings as impatient.

Their villa by the sea is also not luxurious, the living room is stacked with all kinds of antique furniture that Mrs. Smith loves, lively but not messy, everywhere you can see photos of their various periods, their youth to the present, their children's happy childhood to wonderful middle age. I picked up the photograph and looked at it as I listened to Mrs. Smith introduce the background of the time in which the photo was taken.

Those pictures that show real life scenes, beautiful and oil painting-like, make me have to sigh that some people are really God's darlings, and their life mission is to bear witness to God's gifts. I couldn't help but blurt out: "Your life is a reproduction of a fairy tale!" Mrs. Smith listened to my sigh and was silent for a while: "Honey, there has never been any fairy tale in this world, fairy tales are a beautiful imagination in people's hearts, people always think that the grass of other people's homes is greener than their own, that is actually because of the viewing angle." 」 Our lives have also experienced the difficulties and lows that all people experience in their lives, and even the hardships and pains that many people have not experienced, such as our daughter..."

I listened to it for a while, and I always knew that they had two very contentious sons, graduated from famous schools, and now they are also social elites. Mrs. Smith handed over a photograph of her middle-aged with a little girl. I just saw that picture and thought they got married early, and it could be a photo of her and her grandchildren.

Mrs. Smith handed me pictures of the girl one after another, while saying, "I accidentally had her at the age of forty-three, and she was born in the same year as my eldest granddaughter!" She was our princess, she was pretty smart, cute, she was an elf, we thought she would be like her two older brothers, but she met a boy in her first year of college, she dropped out of school for him, lived with him, started fighting, wandering, taking drugs, falling, decadent, four years later, she died, at the age when she should have graduated from college, she died of a drug overdose, she left a three-year-old son, we adopted him..."

Mrs. Smith's tone was calm, and though it was clear that she had tears in her somewhat cloudy eyes, I was so shocked that I could not utter a word, the plot was too unexpected and so inconsistencies with the main theme of the story.

What brought me back from the shock was the wonder: "Why didn't you stop her from associating with the boy at that time?" Later, knowing that they lived like that, why not pull her back? I couldn't help but ask a shallow question.

Mrs. Smith hesitated: "We have persuasion, but that is her own choice!" Just like when we were there, my parents didn't approve of it..."

"But that's a completely different situation, don't you regret that you didn't take a tougher stance on this matter?" Don't you regret it? ”

"We don't regret it, what we have is pain, pain, pain, honey!" Mrs. Smith murmured and repeated.

My deep-seated Chinese mindset doomed this argument to be meaningless, and I chose a truce, because if it were me, I would absolutely do everything I could to frantically stop them from being together, and subconsciously I also insisted that my daughter would at least not end like that, although there were still all kinds of regrets in her life, although she would hate me for it.

It's just that no one's life will come back, and although many major choices are made at a certain moment, the formation of such a situation is the synthesis of multiple factors of the society of birth, the education received, the multiple factors of their own personality, or in the story that has been unable to be rewritten in the past, regardless of their own and others, just listen quietly and see...

(This article edits Zhu Rui)

Column Editor-in-Chief: Gu Yong Text Editor: Gu Yong Title Image Source: Visual China (Concept Map) Photo Editor: Xiang Jianying