This short article was written on the morning of October 20, 2014. At that time, I had been in Binzhou for almost a year. But I was still confused, still hovering on the edge of the city and not being able to blend in. When I didn't know how to integrate into the city, I looked to nature for answers, or natural things, to bring me closer to the city.
That early morning, the autumn wind was cold and the fog was thick. Go east at the entrance of the community. The streets are extremely sparsely trafficked, crawling slowly like snails, and even the sound of the horn is muffled and low. The music of people practicing in the morning came out of the fog, ethereal, a little unreal.
Standing on the Rainbow Bridge, I can't see the way forward or the way back. Dense buildings, streets buried in fog, are still unfamiliar to me. People who are struggling like me in the city, I still don't know where they come from. For a while, I felt that this was a slow-paced city, and every city person was well-fed, and would not go out early and return late like me, bending over for five buckets of rice. The pace of the seasons has not stopped for a moment, just like myself, since moving into the city, like a winding pendulum, always maintaining a highly tense mental state, fighting for life. I was afraid that one day when I heard a cracking sound, the string was finally broken, and only the pendulum of the body, in the box of time, was shaking involuntarily, without a soul.
When I got off the Rainbow Bridge, a pool of disastrous dry lotus burned my heart. I couldn't help but burst into tears. I really hate myself for being too immature, I am middle-aged, and I still can't bear the mutation of life intellectually, just like I can't bear to say that someone who loves you suddenly leaves.
The reeds, the grass, were utterly defeated, showing me with a withered yellow face. It seems that I, a woman who does not accept defeat, will finally one day say the words of surrender, and I will also collapse on the surface of the lake of time. There were also a few reeds standing in the pool, not in a hurry to return. Yes, I know that it is sooner or later to return to old age, so why go and fight with time and make myself scaly. In the face of time, everyone is a loser.
Suddenly, I missed the decades in my hometown. The shallow and narrow pond, the sparse poplar tree, the only Xifu begonia, the man in the white silk robe playing tai chi, the long song of "The Edge of heaven", the sculpture of the fish without the tail, the stone sheep with broken horns and sad eyes, the collapsed rockery, the rusty cage without monkeys and peacocks, the daisies that casually bloom in the garden in autumn. The emaciated yellow flowers that climb on the south wall, the birds that do not know the taste of human sorrow, the morning glory flowers that still shout forward, the man who stands under the long corridor of the wisteria rose and plays "Falling Red", the woman who wears a long skirt and long hair, holds a book, reads and writes poetry, and has no sorrow... In the blink of an eye, it became a memory.
For many years, I was far away from the dust, a lonely person, without saying a word, hiding myself in this garden. This garden is the temple of earth for my years. So, in this city, will the Rainbow Lake, which is richer than the old garden, become my temple of earth again? In fact, in the hustle and bustle of the world, there is no place to hide a person.
I want to pull the corner of a man's clothes from the fog, suddenly call out his name, say his address, and ask him if the daisies in his hometown are open all over the place? The woman who suddenly disappeared from the old garden, do you know where her soul is...
October 20, 2014