Iron Condensed Prose: Long Street Short Dreams

Once, while sending a book at the post office, I met a former classmate. After years of not seeing, she said let's both walk down the street, okay? So we walked aimlessly.

She wanted me to walk down the street with her to tell me that she had an unfortunate encounter: her son died of diphtheria, before he was four years old. Without the support of children, her husband, who did not love her in the first place, quickly left her. This made her feel humiliated, and she felt that there was no more hope for life. She thought of death. She took a train to a city near the sea, where she sat down to write a farewell letter to her parents. The city was so strange, the post office was so noisy, and no one noticed her presence, so that she could lining the strange noise, lining the brown table top with the paste of gaba and the speckles of red and blue ink, and wrote the letter with great indulgence—a kind of desperate indulgence. At this time, an old man with a parcel came up to her and said, "Girl, your eyes are good, you help me recognize this needle." She looked up, and the old man in front of her had white hair, and his old face trembled with a small needle.

My classmate suddenly cried in front of the old man. She suddenly stopped thinking about death and writing goodbye letters. She said that just because the old man called her "girl", because she would always be the "girl" of all the old people in the world, life still needed her, and the most specific need in front of her was that she helped the old man recognize the needle. She even sensed that there was a kind of contrived mannerism in her "indulgent despair".

She recognized the needle and sewed the parcel evenly for the old man's stitches. She left the post office and left the city by the sea to return to her home. She started a new life and found a new love. She said that she was grateful for the old man she met in the post office all her life, not that she had helped him, but that it was the old man who had helped her, who had helped her to continue the life that was about to be broken, just like the connection between needle and thread to complete the cracked parcel. She also said that there was something unpleasant in these days, and she always remembered the old man's words: "Girl, your eyes are good, you help me recognize this needle." She used to think about it on her way to and from work, on the street, passing by some familiar or unfamiliar post office. Sometimes it's as unreal as a dream, but it's so real that you don't want to dream.

However, anything can happen on the street of dreams or in the dream of the street, even if there is a well-stepped road under your feet, even if you have a street that is hundreds of years old in front of you, even if you think that there will be no novelty on this old road, but everything that should happen will happen, because the life of this street and road is far longer than ours.

We used to argue with people on buses, for seats for crowded collisions. But I can never remember the faces that were angry with each other, but I could remember a small yellow flower caught in the crack of the car. The flowers were so petite, each as big as a fingernail. Who picked them up—where did they come from and why did they stick them in the cracks in the windows of this bus? It is difficult for the angry passengers to see the existence of this little bouquet, but when you find them, you realize how unnecessary the anger in your chest is, and then you suddenly realize that on this dilapidated car, just because of this tiny flower, the street it travels through can be called the street of flowers.

If life were like a long street, I wouldn't want to miss every little sight on this street.

If life is just a short dream on the long street, I am willing to make this short dream a business.