"What you keep in your heart will surely echo back."

Were it not for the echoes, there would be no knowing that the settled past still holds so much buried treasure. Life is a one-way arrow. Standing at this point in the present and looking back, the road you came by seems clear, but God knows how many forks you passed. Pity we can't keep saving and loading the way we do when playing through every route of a game; the dead branches are dead, dead before they even grew.

But at least we can keep things in mind. The thoughts in our heads, old memories and new ideas, swirl round and round like volcanic ash in a hot updraft, and whatever manages to rise to the surface of that chaos is precious indeed. What are these things we keep thinking of? Perhaps a book you always wanted to read and never could, perhaps a person you always wanted to see and never could: mostly wishes left unfulfilled along the way, carried quietly for years and still giving off some warmth. Of course these things can't stay in the brain's current processing queue all the time. They leave only a few strong clues, images, emotions, memes, that we are unaware of most of the time, until something triggers them and they are fished up again.

Most of these scattered sparks come to mind and then fade again. A quarter of a hundred years into life, how can I still believe a lie like "will surely echo back"? Survivorship bias, like a ghost, feeds you and me sickly-sweet fake chicken soup for the soul; we savour it, savour it, and then it leaves a bitter taste. No one is a fool. It's just that the road ahead is always thick with fog, behind us there are always too many tangled branches we can't make sense of, and in the present there is only this tiny self. People are just afraid of the dark, and would rather believe that the moon shines with its own light.

Only, there are a few, one in a hundred, that pass through a past no one can explain and ring out in the present, clear and sweet to the ear.

Memory is like a revolt against time. Aren't you one-way? Isn't what's past past? But memory is packed with bombs stuck to countless concepts, and many of these concepts keep turning up in future reality, so some of them are bound to set off a firecracker for you. And then there's a "waaah", sorry, wrong script, I mean a "bang", and the echo, like a cloud-piercing arrow, explodes in your heart and through your body, through all of you.

But this kind of bomb is fairly weak. Landmines, well, they're too passive; they can't even bomb their way to a girlfriend (I meant to type 找, "find", typed 炸, "bomb", by mistake, and found I liked it better; it instantly made me think of fishing with dynamite, the "rocket" bomb in Dou Dizhu, "your mom blew up" and the like). People actually have a far stronger skill: tracing back on purpose.

And so in the future you will think of the past, think of the past you recalled in the past, think of the future you planned in the past, think of the past you planned in the past that you might recall in the future, dot dot dot, sons and grandsons without end.

In these tracings back, you may really see some things clearly: how could I have been so foolish back then; that remark back then may have meant something else after all; back then, once I got arty there was no stopping me; that tree I climbed back then really was damn tall; that bloody village dog back then was actually a ginger cat all along; those bright, forty-five-degree sorrows back then, face tilted up at the sky, were only because my face from the front was too plain (the original borrows a tearful line from Faye Wong's Cantonese song 约定, "Promise"), and so on; there may even be a chance to set off, on purpose, some bombs not yet set off, and hurt and enjoy it at once;

In these tracings back, some slips of paper are folded and put in a drawer to wait for a possible reunion, some burst into flame so that at last they can be let go, and some never turn up even once, lost forever in a vast sea of paper, like the hands of cards you have never shuffled out: you know they exist, but your time won't let you go through them endlessly and tirelessly. That is a helplessness that even those of us who can platinum every game have to accept;

In these tracings back, the past gets rebuilt, and spins and leaps into another person's life, the story of someone familiar yet strange, which you can read with relish until you fall asleep.

The character 溯 always paints a strong picture: going upstream, against the current. Since we don't go with the water and come to rest in the highest good, there must still be some persistence we can't yet let go of.

Before I knew it I had written this far, and as before, I still don't know what I'm writing all this for, but I hope this point, too, will give off light at some point in the future and light up all the fat people, as the joke about getting thin as a lightning bolt has it.

Or perhaps it is only to remind myself, in these tracings back, of a line from Yoga Lin's song 勿忘你 ("Forget Me Not"), which I have bent by one character so that the toy in it becomes a sex toy.

Special thanks to Yoga Lin's album 今日营业中 (in Chinese; English title Sell Like Hot Cakes) for the background music and some of the bathroom breaks.

2017.02