Tears
It has been a long time since I wrote anything — two years, by my count. Every time I picked up the keyboard, wanting to tap out something, I would rarely get past a hundred characters before hastily deleting it. It felt affected; I thought, if it’s in my heart, that’s enough — why set it down in words? Words are pressure, a constraint. Reality is already in turmoil; why add to the trouble? That was when I was being honest with myself. More often, I dared not put things into words at all, feeling I had ulterior motives.
It has been more than two months since my father’s car accident. Most of the time there is only disappointment, and then a little sorrow. In the hardest days, I alone had to run across several departments to contact doctors — from the ICU to the NICU, to orthopedic surgery, to neurology — with only my younger cousin beside me, still small, knowing nothing of the world, and no one at all I could turn to for help. In those days I was only acting on instinct: cold, angry, strangely calm. Cooking, delivering meals, visiting, buying all kinds of sanitary supplies, answering my mother’s calls, and then the endless waiting in every gap of time. There were weeks I didn’t brush my teeth or wash my face, unshaven and scruffy. Occasionally I would spend two or three hours in a nearby bookstore, and it was like a diver, long starved of oxygen, breaking the surface — reborn, joyful, feeling that the present world was well, all peace and harmony. Walking down bustling streets — men and women, wine and lights, mung bean soup, mutton skewers, the world of red dust stretching ten thousand feet — I would feel pity and tenderness, and reflect that being so careful and guarded is something to give up; one must be willing to give up oneself.
Do things well: love, career, family, friendship — do them all well. Have my own home, my own house, kept spotless, with little furniture or none at all, sleeping on the floor. Have people I can exchange a word or two with, quietly doing things together — oil, salt, firewood, rice — planting flowers and growing grass, everything done with my own hands.
Life can be a little worldly: trailing along behind the person in front of you, cracking jokes, bantering — at worst it’s a case of heaven and earth being indifferent. Or it can be detached, that’s fine too: every sentence floating in the air where no one can catch it, doing things only for the self of a hundred years from now, willful and absolute, carried to the extreme — what I want is to leave no room for retreat.
Before the New Year I still thought it took money to set things right; now I feel a good mindset is enough. What matters is reconciliation — reconciling with people and affairs, reconciling with fate. Don’t evade anything; there is no such thing as coming through unscathed.
“About the past, there is nothing to regret, and nothing is accidental; all of it had to be passed through. I don’t believe a person can have more than one choice,” Master Shuo said long ago. Life is Wonderful has a passage of lyrics: “And it takes the one to have the other. And it takes no time to fall in love. But it takes you years to know what love is. And it takes some fears to make you trust.” The past, all its cycles and repetitions, is best left unclear and unexplained. Be willing to give up yourself; if you do something wrong, apologize — but cross over it. Once it’s past, it’s open plain all the way.
However hard things get, talk them over with the people beside you, sleep on it, and in one night everything will be better.