Twenty-five and a half years. Since change is unavoidable, enjoy it, and ride it.
2017.06
When the starry sky over the city slowly dims, where can the dreams of childhood be found?
— Epigraph
Since there are only twenty minutes left, I might as well write a little.
The sky has been fairly clear these last few days. Although the temperature keeps dropping, the padded coat of cloud, like tattered cotton wadding, that stands for winter has broken up again (I'd thought winter was coming early). The hem of this autumn swept past in a flash; the weather really is getting harder and harder to read. But I never expected that I could still see the starry sky I've missed for so long. It's really lovely.
I've been busy lately, as if the east wind had wrung out all the lazy moisture stored in my days, leaving them tight, without a single crack to slip into. At least for now, only the endless "bedtime long run" lets me cast off all my jumbled thoughts, all the tongue-twisting theorems, all the twisting, turning three-dimensional structures of molecules. Just running: whatever the purpose before I start, once I've started, none of the reasons matter any more. Just run, take in oxygen, give off heat, sweat.
Whenever I've run three or four laps and I'm warming up and panting, a strange scene often surfaces in my mind: ATP molecules one after another, in a jumble, jostling and shoving, snapping apart with a "crack-crack-crack", sending energy into my cells, my joints, every muscle that moves, while most of what goes unused is finally lost with the sweat, rising from my pores as white steam. So it seems that even like this, I still can't completely forget the things I'm trying hard to forget.
As I ran, I happened to glance up at the night sky, and something stirred faintly in my heart. Stars, one, two, three, four, stars I hadn't seen for so long, blurry and half-visible in my memory. I wasn't wearing my glasses, but I could make out many of them with my naked eye as it is now. Their rough outlines stirred thread after thread of a familiar, fond feeling. In a daze, I felt I had come to the sports field for these tiny, tiny points of starlight from the start. They aren't bright, but they dot the black curtain of night and bring a gentle, peaceful feeling. As I gazed, the heat all over me seemed to fade little by little, and everything grew still, my body temperature and the usual irritable itch in my heart alike. The rushing about of these few days suddenly felt far away, washed fainter and fainter, like a dream tightly wrapped in exhaustion, whose details, once you wake, have almost all been devoured by the dream-eating baku.
In the haze, what grew clearer was my childhood love for that ocean overhead, my devotion to star after star, my tracing of constellation after constellation. Compared with a person, the stars are almost eternal, and yet just then I suddenly felt that sixteen years was a far greater distance. Because the dream that once shone so brightly has long been buried far too deep by that hurried distance, and has long since lost all its light. I couldn't help feeling a little wistful. A sense of loss, like the starlight overhead right now: faint, but clear and hard to wipe away.
Like someone walking down a mottled road, countless strange and dazzling things flashing past; looking back, they find that the road they came by has long been forgotten, and there's no turning back. And the hourglass of time, in this brief moment of gazing, has quietly let fall one more grain of sand.
2008.10