I used to go to elementary school on the slope of elementary school. The elementary school is located on the top of a small hillside next to the county park, so the slope is called "elementary school slope", and the school is also called "elementary school slope primary school". There are more than a hundred bluestone steps leading to the top of the slope. When I was seven years old, my grandmother took me to the primary school slope to register for preschool. I climbed halfway up the hill, but I couldn't really climb, and my grandmother carried me on her back.
I was seven years old and my grandmother was seventy-five. I had just returned to the interior from Xinjiang, and I was overwhelmed with poisonous sores, and my face was covered with sores and scars, and my flesh and blood were blurred. Eating a bite of rice makes my cheeks hurt. So there's less to say. But I don't cry. I didn't cry since I was a kid. My mother said that I was only carried upside down by the doctor when I was just born, slapped my ass twice, and then I cried twice. I haven't cried since. Sick, hungry, wrestling, just "humming" twice at most. Even when I was three years old, I had a car accident and my leg was crushed, and I didn't really cry out. My mother said that when I was a child, I was a gentle and quiet good child. But then I started crying. What happened? My crying was earth-shattering. I was hysterical, I was crying and playing, I was rolling on the ground, I didn't eat, I didn't go to bed, I was nervous, I was biting everyone who came to persuade me, I was arrogant, and my heart was full of hatred. What happened? What do I see? What irritated me? What makes me so hopeless?
I went to school at Primary Slope. That was more than a decade ago. But at dinner tonight, my grandmother suddenly asked me, "Do you remember when you were a child in elementary school?" ”
"Remember."
"Then do you remember what you said?"
"What words?"
She recounted it.
It made me fall into the vast and boundless childhood in an instant... Look around there... But there is no such sentence...
I had deliberately forgotten that sentence, but I didn't expect to go to my grandmother. She quietly remembered for me, and cherished it deeply for me. She was ninety-two and I was twenty-four.
"After you said that to me, I will pick you up every day at the slope of the primary school and sit in the pavilion on the edge of the weir pond under the slope, waiting for you to finish school..."
Then she called out to me like a dream: "幺幺, 幺幺... My sister-in-law..."
I went to school at Primary Slope. Could it be that I started crying after I said that to my grandmother? Only then did I start my whole life crying, my lifelong confusion, my lifelong shame and hatred... I once said such a sentence, I said it viciously, in the mouth of a child, pretending to be naïve. I don't want to repeat that sentence a second time! My grandmother was ninety-two years old, and she was dying, and after she died, no one knew about it! With the strong guilt and sadness of death, I told these things about the past, and buried the words again and again. And this is to bury all the ignorance and contempt that I once had. And start retaliating.
I went to school at Primary Slope. Every day, I stepped on more than a hundred steps, carried my school bag, and walked into the campus. My school bag was ugly and full of patches. By then, I already knew the difference between a lot of things – male and female, beautiful and ugly, good and bad. I was seven years old and already had shame. I carried this bag to school and began to know how I was different from my classmates. I was seven years old and the oldest in preschool. When I was still with my mom, she wouldn't let me go to school because I always slept late in the morning. My mother pitied me, saw that I slept so soundly, and couldn't bear to wake me up. So I was always late for school and was always corporalized by the teacher. Once, my mother was passing by the school and stopped by to see me, just in time to run into me who was being penalized. The whole class was sitting, and I was standing alone in the back corner of the classroom, with my back to everyone, my nose pressed against the wall. So she had a big fight with the teacher and resolutely led me home. She bought her own textbooks to teach me to read. At that time, she was a farm worker, working in the field during the day, and came back at night to play with building blocks and read fairy tales with me. There are no boundaries on those days. I always played quietly alone on the Gobi Desert, with rows of poplar forest strips in the distance and boundless land in the distance. Tall, high-horsepower tractors whizzed in and whizzed away. My mother was there.
I went to school at Primary Slope. I began to brew a sentence and found an opportunity to pretend to be naïve and say it, which made my grandmother feel guilty about me. Every day, when school was almost over, she would wait for me in the pavilion by the weir pond on the slope of the elementary school and take me home. The weir pond is covered with lotus flowers. A curved Woboo Bridge runs across the corner of the weir pond, with a stone platform close to the water in the middle, and the pavilion is on one side. My grandmother sat inside and looked up at the slope of the elementary school. There were always a lot of people in the pavilion, all old people. Storytellers, singing passages, swinging dragon gate arrays. My grandmother was also an old man, but she was different from them. One look at it tells you it's different. She was picky. She always carried one or two cardboards, an empty wine bottle, a roll of scrap wire or a stick of firewood that she had picked up from the dumpster. She was dressed in shabby clothes, but her smile was frank and joyful. She saw me. She waved at me. She stood up.
I went to school at Primary Slope. I found that everyone in the world, except me, knew what the world was all about. I was abandoned. Only my grandmother sat in the pavilion at the bottom of the slope every day waiting for me to come home, rain or shine, never changing. She clutched a cardboard in one hand and an empty wine bottle in the other. Let's go home together. Passing by the City God Temple outside the south gate, called two or two meats; when passing the row of large garbage cans at the "Gate Gate", look at them one by one and pick them up. She and I were next to each other, and I was also lying on the edge of the bucket looking in, pointing from time to time: "There, there... There's also a bottle cap over here..." My grandmother picked up garbage, and we made a living from it." I was a kid who grew up on a garbage dump. Our house was also full of garbage. My grandmother picked them up and I helped sort them. Where the wire is placed, where the broken glass is placed, where the rotten cloth head is placed, where the waste paper is placed, I am familiar with the road. My hands were sharp and cheerful. I know these are all useful things that can be exchanged for money. These things almost filled our room. Our home is in a small, crowded courtyard, a century-old wooden house, dark and damp, a total of less than eight square meters. Crowded with endless garbage, a stove, fifty briquettes, a kimchi jar, a fixed bed, and a bed that was put away during the day and opened at night. Living with me, my grandmother and my grandmother's mother—my grandmother's mother was over a hundred years old. And I'm seven years old. My grandmother's mother was the first person in my life who could not understand, the first person to lose. Later her death was related to me.
I went to school at Primary Slope. I don't want to say anything more. Every time I write a word, I am facing my cruelty to myself in a straight face. Those things in the past, those things that can no longer be changed, after being thrown away by me, have piled up into my future. Can't get around it. There is no way around it. I went to school on the slope of the elementary school, and the pavilion on the Wobo Bridge on the side of the weir pond under the slope could not be bypassed. I was out of school and my classmates and I walked down the long steps. Later, I left my classmates and walked toward the pavilion. My grandmother was holding an empty wine bottle in one hand and a fresh brown sugar-filled white-faced pot helmet in the other! Almost proudly, she shook the hand holding the dough high at me. I don't want to say anything more.
However, I still went to school in the primary school slope. In the spring, the campus is full of flowers. There is a tree full of pink flowers on the side of the playground, and the fine flowers are piled up all over the branches. I folded one branch, and the flower immediately fell off, and I held only an empty branch in my hand. Later discovered by the teachers, they took me into a room I had never been to and treated me like a real thief. I was seven years old. I am not a thief. I didn't look good, my face was full of sores, but that wasn't my fault. I was the oldest and the worst in my class, and that wasn't my fault... Our family picks up garbage, specializing in picking up things that other people don't want – that's still not a fault! In the eyes of others, the garbage is "dirty", but in my opinion, they are "tolerable dirty..." I have done nothing wrong, and at the same time, I really do not know what "wrong" is. I really don't know that flowers can't be picked, not pretend not to know. Everyone knows that flowers can't be picked, but I don't know, is this "wrong"? ...... I squeezed the empty branch tightly. I was abandoned.
I still attended po in elementary school. Every day when I came home from school, I helped my grandmother sort the garbage. That was my greatest pleasure. The garbage, the stuff that others don't want anymore, is now all ours. We can exchange them for money and use them as much as we want. The golden spikes removed from the cardboard box are twisted into rings to become sparkling rings; all kinds of paper boxes can be used to hold all kinds of good things; white foam boards, which can be cut to make boats, full of masts, hang flags, and then put into the river to watch it swim far away; the paper that has written has a clean back and can depict the fairies on the most beautiful calendar; the best things are those beautiful empty bottles, crystal clear, large and small can be used to live in the family... It was many years before I realized what I had done: I grew up in a sea of human-made waste, secretly making insignificant changes. Only I know how terrible the behavior of people making garbage is...
Yes, I went to school at Poe Elementary School. What is that slope made of? Every day, I walked down more than a hundred steps to the pavilion by the weir pond. My grandmother stood in the sun and smiled at me. Her apron was bulging around her chest. I looked closer, and there was a pile of scrap copper and rotten iron in my pocket. I rummaged inside and found a large bunch of keys. I was so happy that I threaded the string of keys through my chest. But my classmates laughed at me, even though they all had keys hanging from their chests. I finally understood that I had too many keys, large and small, long and short, a total of twenty or thirty. No one's house has so many doors to open, and my door never needs to be locked. My house is less than eight square meters, and my grandmother, who is more than a hundred years old, sits in the house all day, sitting in the middle of a pile of garbage. There are really no valuables in this house that are afraid of losing. Even if it is locked, the door of my house will not be closed. The door was in the old style, two open in opposite directions, nearly two meters high, thick and heavy. There are no hinges, and the upper and lower ends are inserted into the wooden mortar. After more than a hundred years of use, the door is shallow, and with a gentle lift, the door can be removed. A two-palm-wide door panel was broken on the door, allowing a small child to easily slip in. My classmates came to my house to play, and none of them had ever seen such a door. It was novel, very happy, and everyone stood on the high threshold of my house and chattered for a long time, drilling in and out from time to time from the crack of the door panel. I was so happy to see them, and I was so happy myself. But then, one by one, their parents came and beat and scolded them and took them away. They never came again.
I went to school at Primary Slope. My studies are not good. The teacher kept beating me and pinching my eyelids. Because when I do eye exercises, I have to close my eyes, but I don't. The whole class closed, but I didn't. The teacher came over and pinched me. My eyes were bleeding. But he didn't dare to let his grandmother know, so he just told her that he had fallen. Because the whole class closed their eyes at that time, I didn't close them, and that was my fault. I seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. This distinction makes all that I once knew no longer come close to me... They closed for me. I had to follow a different path in the world. I went to school in elementary school and kept learning at school. I learned more and more new things, and my shame blurred. But I became more mindful of patched school bags and scars on my face. I began to descend into chaos. I came home from school, and for the first time, my grandmother didn't greet me in the pavilion. My eyes don't bleed anymore, but they still hurt when I blink. I cried and went home alone. When passing by the garbage can on the side of the road, I still habitually lie on it and look inside, tearfully, to see if there is anything useful inside.
I went to school at Primary Slope. I had more than twenty keys hanging around my neck. The keys were no longer useful, they were discarded, and the doors they were able to open were discarded. They're all garbage, they're superfluous, and they're no longer needed. However, one by one, they are still so new, so bright, one by one, heavy, with real weight, with precise pitch and groove... And it's no longer useful! All the thoughts and efforts it took to produce them in the first place are meaningless! It took a lot of thought and effort, but in the end it produced garbage. Also produced in batches, on a large scale ... This is not production, this is consumption, it is excessive demand... We were abandoned. After school, we poured out of the campus in groups, as if we had just been produced. We ran down more than a hundred steps with joy. Do we still have meaning?
I went to school at Primary Slope... I'm talking too much. I cried too much. But the beginning of my life was not to cry, my soul was once peaceful and joyful, I was gentle... Hurt me!" ...... Tonight, however, my grandmother reminded me of the past and unveiled my sealed childhood. Only then did he suddenly realize how great the power he was hiding was. Let me finally face it: Grandma is ninety-two years old, I am twenty-four years old. We're all at the end of the process. My grandmother died with a word, and I died with a word. Well, I'll never say it again. I said it a little too early. There are still more long years ahead, how should I live? I just remember a long time ago, when I was still in elementary school, one day I first met sadness... I came home that day and cried while sorting out the garbage. Later, I gradually fell asleep. At that time, I had not thought about the things of fate.
(Source Internet, only for exchange of Xi, invasion and deletion)
Focus on reading and sleeping, poetic inhabitation
Facing the sea, look for light with black eyes. Founded on November 16, 2015, the Poetry Club takes "giving voice to grassroots poets" as its mission and carries forward the "spirit of poetry" as its purpose, that is, the pursuit of the truth, goodness and beauty of poetry, the artistic innovation of poetry, and the spiritual pleasure of poetry. He has published a collection of poems co-authored by poets, "Spring Warm Blossoms of Reading Sleeping Poems" and "Grass Long Warblers Flying in Reading Sleeping Poems".