Everything will flow, like tears in rain.

2017.05

In the blink of an eye it has been four years. Soon it will be ten, twenty, thirty, until the living know only from the historical record that such a thing once happened.

Ordinary life was shattered almost in an instant; everything became unrecognizable, as if we had arrived in a completely strange world. Dust fell from the ceiling, desks and chairs hopped about the floor, the corridor heaved up and down just like a fairground ride, people surged through the stairwells, and someone had hold of my hand. Then came a night when sleep would hardly come. If the radio waves from mobile phones had been visible, they would have been dense as a thicket, yet no one could get through to all those urgent numbers. The early-summer rain and the tremors coming up through the grass of the sports field came in waves, one after another, seemingly without end. I forced my eyes shut, but could not sleep for a single minute.

After that came so many, many more things, too vivid to fade, remembered down to the finest hair. Only those who lived through it understand what those days were, days you never forget. And all these memories, all these memories of tens of millions of people, look to those who weren't there like nothing more than a symbol without depth. In fact I was lucky; many of us were lucky, only because we happened not to be in the most hopeless places, only because the people closest to us happened to come through without serious harm. It was just an ordinary Tuesday afternoon; many people, still bleary-eyed, were getting ready for school or work, and many were still asleep. Just ordinary places: classrooms, offices, streets. And then a few minutes later nothing was as before.

A few months later, my mother and I sat in a KFC watching the live broadcast of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on the TV on the wall, and it felt almost like another lifetime. I believe everyone grew up that year.

I often tell myself that having lived through a time like that, I must have gained a lot that others don't have. But sometimes I feel that weighing gains and losses like this is deeply disrespectful to that time, and to the people whose wounds still ache today.

What is life? Why do people have to live in this world? Why do lives that are the same at birth follow completely different paths?

I think again of a boy who had transferred back to Beichuan Middle School at the time and narrowly survived. He had just arranged to teach a boy in his class to play Warcraft, a promise that can now never be kept. Opening QQ at the weekend: a great expanse of greyed-out names. That kind of grief is hard to imagine. Life is like a melody you cannot predict: today it may be climbing to its climax, and by the small hours it stops dead. Countless lives together make a symphony of boundless complexity, and a few players dropping out seems not to change the course of the whole movement. But, but, but, a few voices really are missing; those instruments will never sound again, and only the players nearest to them can hear it. And yet the music goes on. What could the conductor do, even hearing it? The whole orchestra can't just stop. Life goes on.

And then did everything settle? One year, two, three, four, ten, twenty years on, jostled and crammed full by busy life day after day, we gradually forget our own rhythm, gradually forget our own voice, and life is squeezed dry into fast food, simple and repetitive. Squandering becomes the highest ideal everyone fights over, and other people's lives become the templates we pick for our own. Where is your own melody? Where are you going with this one and only life? On a spring morning, with dew all over the flowers, where are you going? On a summer day, with bright sun and a deep blue sky, where are you going? On an autumn night, with a clear breeze, a bright moon and yellowing leaves, where are you going? In winter, with clouds thick as cotton wadding and cold that reaches the tops of your feet, where are you going?

I think I should always live on as a survivor, in fear and trembling. Before the music stops dead, play out my own life.

A messy piece of writing, in memory of the lives that left so suddenly. Until the end, I will be good to myself.

2012.05