Ha ha

During the video call today, you said you interviewed a guy in a rainbow t-shirt.You laughed and said that young people’s strong desire to express has tripled the air pressure in the office, as if you don’t deserve to breathe freely if you don’t announce your self to the world.While we were discussing the possibility of this fearless little life being shattered and reshaped by reality, my mind wandered for a moment, and I was actually reminded of a past event.

When I was in elementary school, I followed my mother to visit a dying relative.When we walked into the ward, it happened that the old man came back and left his last words to his children.He apologized vaguely while crying, and I clearly remember him muttering: "Actually, I am that one."

The adults around the hospital bed seemed to be collectively deaf for three seconds due to a mysterious force, skipped this sentence in unison, and advised him not to think about it, and take good care of his illness.Panting for breath, the old man suddenly blushed, and said with the loudest voice his dying body could squeeze out, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Within a minute of saying this, he stopped breathing.I was so impressed because of the reaction of his juniors.

His children expressed varying degrees of anger by crying, and the main reason for the anger was that "people are confused, and they insist on walking in such a disgraceful way."Other relatives comforted me gently, and the content was roughly "the old people can talk nonsense, we didn't hear anything".

My mother took me out of the ward, and I took advantage of the chaos and whispered to her who "that" was.With a sullen face, she only replied: "You heard wrong."

There were also a few distant relatives standing in the corridor outside the ward, talking about which of the children refused to accompany them, who cried but didn't cry, and who got into trouble with the family property.I knew only half of what I heard, and suddenly I saw a five or six-year-old girl squatting by the door of the ward, frowning and thinking about something seriously.

I remembered that she should be a distant cousin in terms of seniority, so on a whim, I asked, "What are you thinking?"

She said: "Grandpa was bitten by a mosquito on his hand, and now that he is dead, will the lump never go away?"

So I went back to the ward to check, but the deceased had been covered with a white cloth and his hands could not be seen.

I will never forget that mosquito bag.

A life on the hospital bed just passed away, brain waves disappeared, cells stopped regenerating, excrement slowly flowed out of the body, and the soul returned to darkness and eternal silence.And a foot away from the terrible silence, in the movement of life, everyone is crying and expressing something, the living are immersed in sorrow, joy, greed and hatred, in the noisy wave of the gathering of seven emotions and six desires. There are ups and downs in it, and it will never stop running towards a new dawn.

The only faint afterglow of this mortal death struggling in the world is the mosquito bag reflected in the little girl's eyes.

A week later I attended the farewell ceremony, and the grown-ups gathered around the coffin and wept heartbroken.Sure enough, no one mentioned the last words of the deceased, and everyone thoughtfully and decently forgot his last, and possibly only, self-confession, and even rejected a new image that appeared suddenly.I think the other object they cry must be a modified version of the deceased.

From that day forward, I developed a prejudice against self-expression.I don't think it's worth anything.

When I was a little older, I learned about my orientation and finally understood the last words.The result was that for a while, I kept having the same dream over and over again.

In the dream, I desperately wanted to speak, but my mouth was tightly covered by an unknown person, and I was held as a prisoner for the rest of my life.It wasn't until I was very old that I suddenly decided to be brave before I died, rushed out of the cell and shouted hoarsely, only to find that there was no one around for a hundred miles, only the boundless huge fallen leaves.It turned out that I was a cicada that missed the summer.

Dear Chen Chuan, more than ten years ago when I met you, I thought about neighing, but then I experienced parting and death one after another.In the end, it seemed that the dream matured early, and the only relatives around me were my younger brother who was not yet sensible, and I lost all the people I listened to. I came out, only to find that no one was out there.For me, coming out has become a one-man show that I am entertaining myself with.

There are many young people in my university who are similar to your interviewees.I once had a roommate who, straight enough to raise a flag, painted his face rainbow colors and went to a campus parade with a trumpet and fireworks.When he went out, he had a heroic look on his face, and when he came back, he had overlapping lip prints on his face.

I was shy of any kind of group orgy back then, and with a lot of malice.I think people who are thrown into emotional waves are no longer human, their ego is compressed into a noisy cicada.Giving oneself a more noble meaning through collective behavior and fighting against chaos by incarnating chaos is itself a manifestation of dementia.

Looking at it today, of course I was wrong.Because I can imagine you as a young boy on the other side of the ocean, dear Chenchuan, you are waving small colorful flags, and you are smiling brightly because you are walking in the sun.

In any case, my overloaded malice that year was directed not only at the world, but also at myself.After meeting my then-partner by chance, I completely shut down my self-expression.We talk about movies and supper, about philosophy and art, about Oscar Wilde's saying that "society exists only in spiritual concepts, and in the real world there are only individuals"-but we never talk about ourselves.

"I" is penniless, a poisonous minion, a rotting flesh that brings bad luck once cast.I even envisioned living my life like this, with him reading a eulogy after my death for a stranger whose version had been redacted.But what does that matter? "I" is the root of all evil.

We maintained our relationship with deformed silence.In that silence, he painted several portraits of me, each with a blank face without features.

Only once, after we had broken up, did I show him my ugly face, which indirectly caused his death.

Unlike the relative whose last words were erased, he was able to leave a sentence before his death, which echoed endlessly in my world and was deafening.The general meaning of this sentence is: People like you are not qualified to love others.

Dear Chenchuan, two years before I met you, I was in such a state: half of my body was dragged into the silent realm of death, the other half was eaten away by poison, and I sank into the lingering sound of judgment.If you express it like this, I don't know if you will realize how amazing you are.

Once we talked at the airport, you said that every time you get off the plane, whether you walk into PVG or JFK, you always feel that you have broken into someone else’s territory and you are a foreigner.As a way of life, you have honed a soft personality that blends in with the environment at any time and place-you call it subjective mediocrity."I deeply embrace my mediocrity," you laugh and claim.

You are not mediocre at all, you deserve the most tender treatment in the world.Your joy, your confusion, your anger, your pain, are noble in my eyes because of their honesty.

After spending many years with you, one thing I gradually realized is that I never really came0ut back then.

Dear Chen Chuan, everyone should be the first person to come out of the closet.Who we are, what we love, what we practice, what we fear, what we believe in—accepting ourselves before others.In this sense, you are outside the closet door from the very beginning, and you walk frankly and fearlessly in the vast world.

When I love you like this, I seem to have become a person who is slightly worthy of being loved.

You said that the kid who came to the interview wearing a rainbow T-shirt was like a Don Quixote who couldn't find his enemy.Your concerns are obvious.People with mental cleanliness are especially prone to get lost in the waves, and they may also go to the other extreme like me back then, exile themselves in order to stay away from other people's hell.

But I think he will figure it out sooner or later.Every young person learns at last that there is a dignity and nobility in the very act of being yourself and being true to yourself.For in living thus they are no longer waves, but silent reefs beneath.

Lately I have occasionally thought of that relative from my childhood.I imagined his twisted life in darkness, and the remorse in his dying heart.I guess the person he apologized to when he was dying was probably himself.

But, my dearest Chris, if I can stand with you as a pair of clumsy boulders, I will thank myself from the bottom of my heart on that day.

——Bai Qi