Practice being alone: ​​when I started to love myself

Chapter 7 Be quiet, my heart (1)
It's okay to be lonely

The advantage of early summer is that the green outside the window is not the same every day before falling asleep and when waking up.Day by day thick as day.

There are often various birds flying by the window, with white feathers and long tails.Perch in a tree or park in your yard.The most daring one was the sparrow, who came to the desk chirping and chattering, with a plump and lovely figure and clear eyes.

They sang and danced, restless for a moment, with that kind of childish earnestness, and sometimes curiously looked at the books and manuscript papers spread out on my desk, as if they were discussing some important matter, but in the end there was no result, just poof With a groan, they flew away.Such a close distance makes me feel fearful respect for the soul living in this tiny body.

In the corner where I lived in London, I often met a middle-aged woman dressed like a gypsy with long curly gray hair.When she saw someone walking by, she would put her index finger on her lips to signal the person to be silent.She holds corn kernels in her hand, and there are many pigeons gathered at her feet, all gray, like a black cloud that has landed.Later I preferred to take a detour.I'm afraid that the sweet smile on her face seems to hint at a deep secret.

Mike Ondaatje said in The English Patient that birds like to perch on dead branches because they can fly in all directions.it is as expected.As spring progressed, I noticed that they had to look more carefully each day for less leafy branches.They like TV antennas best.

I like being a redneck.On both sides of the country road, large tracts of rice are filling, and the light green in the wind is the aroma of rice flowers.The thistles were in full bloom by the roadside, and there was a cloud of pale purple.When the car drove by, the small white butterflies that lived on it flew up at the same time in an instant. It was a slow motion playback, and snowflakes fell to the sky one after another.

Recently, I looked for "Onmyoji" again to watch, not just to read ghost stories, in "Zibuyu"

I have seen all kinds of ghosts.What I like is Abe Seimei's overgrown yard, and the way he and Yuan Hiroya talk about "curse" while drinking.Often Minamoto would bring the appetizers, and Abe Seimei would prepare the wine, and the two would chat while drinking.Often not many words, but very interesting.Abe Seimei is a guy who attracts me very much. When he said, "The so-called curse may be the name. The shortest curse in the world is the name." Immediately, Laozi riding on the back of a bull and the little prince holding a rose came out of my mind. called out.

The description of Abe Seimei's residence before the story started made me unable to stop, but my favorite part is the description of the snow scene in the last story "White Bhikkhuni" of "Onmyoji 1".Abe Seimei and Yuan Hiroya were roasting dried fish on the stove, drinking wine and enjoying the snow. The snow was getting bigger and bigger, and a person was coming.It reminds me of my favorite Wujue "Ask Liu Nineteen".

Green ant new glutinous rice wine, red clay small stove.Can you drink a cup if you want to snow in the night?

How can one step into such a peaceful and serene moment in one's life?
The Nightmare Tapir wrote the following dialogue at the beginning of this story:
"What's the matter?" Seimei shifted his gaze from the courtyard to Boya.

"I thought about asking you before, do you live alone in this big house of yours?"

"So what?"

"Don't you feel lonely?"

Seimei stared at Boya who asked the question, and smiled slightly.

"I'll feel lonely too, and I'll be lonely too."

Seimei seemed to be talking about other people's affairs.

"However, loneliness and loneliness have nothing to do with whether there is anyone in the house."

"What do you mean?"

"People are lonely."

"Lonely?"

"That's the way people are."

"You mean, people are born lonely?"

"That's roughly what it means."

The moment I put down the book and fell asleep, I remembered that the trees outside the window would be greener tomorrow, and I felt that there was nothing wrong with being lonely.

we are the same

The heroine is called Chestnut.She lives in buckwheat words, and I live in this world.

But we are all the same.

We were the same age, went to study in the same city in the same year, studied the same major, graduated in the same year, and engaged in the same job.

I cut the pages out of business cards and read them as I went.The contents are as familiar as flipping through your own diary.

The central idea of ​​all Diary of a Teenage Girl can be summed up in a few words: love someone and miss it.

Once young, then slowly mature.But Buckwheat wrote Chestnut's diary on the changes of the times, achieving the depth of a seemingly simple and plain story with the span of time.

Lizi and her friends are studying, forming clubs, and falling in love in a remote campus, while the outside world is equally vigorous, like a clockwork machine, constantly turning, and then dragging them in and dragging us in.

I read so many details of college life in the book, as well as the endless social news and fashion trends, which are both familiar and far away.As if staring at your own photo for too long, it took a while to suddenly realize:

Oh, so many things have happened in my life!
At the beginning of the story, the 20-year-old was young, trivial, and self-righteous and naive, secretly driving us to interpret the first love and the purest feelings seriously with twisted twists.But in fact, those temptations and persistence, those heartbreaks and stubbornness, just like our hobbies back then, whether it is popular singers or niche writers, are not unique tastes, but are deeply imprinted by the times.

They never belonged to us, they belong with us, the passage of time.Today outsiders, like them, see them being recorded, in black and white.Only then did I understand how sad those people who are obsessed with one thought are.

It turns out that when all the lightness is superimposed, it becomes an unspeakable heaviness.When all the emptiness overlaps, it becomes an impenetrable melancholy.

A year of change, a stubborn girl's heart.

Matilda asked the killer Leon: Is life so hard, or is it only in childhood?
I will tell her: It is not too late to ask this question after you are 20 years old.

But no matter how old you are, as long as you are not so persistent, life will not be so bitter.

The difference between me and Lizi is that I am not so enthusiastic about the online world, and I don't know how to play Xici and BBS.

Also, the boy I like is not Su Li's.

Although many years later, I have successfully ranked among my friends among the "senior literary and artistic young women" with my small and fresh photography style, short black hair with noodles in clear soup, and full-body MUJI, but there is a big difference between literary and artistic young women and literary young women.I love the feelings and talents of Haruki Murakami and Xu Lan as much as Lizi, but I think Lizi is more like a literary young woman, so I fell in love with Su Li, a tall and thin literary boy. In fact, only hugs and holding hands.As a young woman in literature and art, I am a visual school, I only love beautiful boys, and take their spiritual world for granted.When I was in college, I fell in love with the boy I met in public class, and I kept writing love letters to him, every day.Wrote that he had to respond to my blind love.

Li Zi and Su Li have been together for so long, their love sprouted, but they didn't express their feelings.On the contrary, my "campus lover" and I understood our feelings too early, and getting along has become a step-by-step procedure like installing furniture according to the manual.Then I went abroad to study and left my handsome "campus lover" to his suitors.

The result can be imagined.But looking back now, everything went exactly according to my preset script.And I was so involved in acting that the tears became real in the end.

I remember that a week before I got this book, I interviewed Cai Kangyong, whom Lizi likes. The filming scene was full of choking smoke for the effect. I held back tears and asked him many irrelevant questions.This is probably the last character interview I wrote in my life, and it was also a failure.

He asked: Why do you think I'd be interested in other people's stories?

I would say: Of course you don't, because no one is really interested in other people's stories.We just look for a yardstick for ourselves in other people's stories: he is more interesting than me, he is more unlucky than me, he may be richer than me, but he is not as happy as me, he has a higher education than me, but his wife is not as beautiful as mine... I am moved by Lizi's story, perhaps only because I have seen my past years from her.

But what moved me must be Lizi's persistence, not my own compromise.

And just before the interview with Cai Kangyong, I dug out the master degree certificate that had been idle for many years, and decided to work in a foreign company.I talked with personnel for half an hour, and when I left, I saw her business card read: Personnel Supervisor, Vivienne.I almost asked: Have you watched "Farewell to Vivian", do you wear diamond stud earrings?When I walked into the elevator, I burst out laughing at my cold humor and associative power.

I found a Starbucks, went to the bathroom to change my suit, and for no reason remembered the divine post recommended by Douban:

"Even if I become a vulgar woman... I can't forget" I don't know if the IBM computer and Blackberry mobile phone equipped by the company can help me create such beautiful and trembling words.This is really a touching and outrageous future.

I took "The Biggest Fire" to fly to the south on a business trip, soaked in the bathtub after work and read it slowly.The water is hot, but the mountain-like white foam is cold.During breakfast, I found that the handsome boy from Hong Kong TVB was sitting at the next table, and now he is drinking tea and playing golf with his uncle.

At the end of the novel, Li Zi and Su Li missed each other at the airport.In my life, I successfully met my "campus lover" when I was changing planes in Beijing. In the age of mobile phones, everything was fast and without suspense, so I lacked feelings.

Over the years, he did not write affectionate letters to me like Su Li did, but only looked for the words I published, and wishful thinking that they were all written for him.After all, I used to love writing to him so much that reading my handwriting became a habit he could not correct.He is married and has a child.Said that the child was born in May like me.He drove me around Beijing city until the street lights came on.Then I took an early morning flight to Ulaanbaatar, and then rented a car to the Gobi.

I am not a nostalgic person, but I want to see the wilderness in my heart and the innocent and forced companion before seeing the desolation of the world.

In the past ten years, changes have evolved into changes.

We hold on and run for something that will never come, until one day we part ways with ourselves.And such a miserable decade is actually the best time in our lives.

Some things are destined to never be too late.

If one day I never come to you again
Hong Kong writer Zhong Xiaoyang was born in Guangzhou in December 1962 and grew up in Hong Kong. In 12, she made a sensation in the Hong Kong literary world with "Parking Temporary Borrowing Question" and won the Lianhe Daily Novel Award.Some people say that she was only 1981 years old when she wrote this novel with a very wide span of time and space.Since then, Zhong Xiaoyang is considered to be famous at a young age, and it is difficult to break through.

"Elegy" is her not-so-famous short story. Zhong Xiaoyang was only 24 years old after the completion of the draft, but she was already at the mature stage of her creation. There was a melancholy indifference in looking back on the thoughts of a teenager in middle age, just like getting up to drink that cup in the middle of the winter night. Chilled tea.

This is a simple love story that took place in San Francisco: a Hong Kong girl studying in Bibang fell in love with a descendant of a local Chinese immigrant who was many years older than her. He quit his job as an airline mechanic and became a hard-working commercial fisherman, driving a fishing boat to sea.The girl wanted to follow, but eventually separated.

I was 16 years old when I read the story of "Elegy", and now it has been many years, it is difficult to express exactly what moved me deeply and made me fall in love with the seaport city of San Francisco as the background of the story.Maybe it's the youthful melancholy in it, or maybe it's the hero's obsession with sailing that caters to my yearning for the ocean.

In the story, the two sat in the car watching the rain and listening to the sound of the ship's cables beating the mast. The hero asked: "If one day, I never come to you again, do you know why?" Zhong Xiaoyang described The voice was "as crisp as jade objects colliding".And in the following years, I have always wanted to know what the voice was like, just like the girl in the story spent the time after separation to understand the answer to that question.

Until one summer vacation, I passed by Geneva and took a nap by the lake.In the long evenings of late summer in Europe, the sun has gone down but night has not yet come, and the world is shrouded in a clear blue-gray light.The returning sailboats were moored by the lake, and in a moment of silence, I heard the sound of jingling and knocking, the lake was rippling, and the ship cables were beating the mast.

On the mountain opposite the lake, there are houses built against the mountain, with light outlines and bright lights.

At that moment, I understood the scene in the book, and I also knew that if one day, I would never come to you again, it would be because you and I each have an uninhabited island in our hearts, waiting quietly on the other side of the water.

Our goal in life is to get there.And it is in order to arrive that we forsake each other.

long days will end
I found myself able to understand Graham Greene.

I bought this book The end of the affair when the bookstore was promoting Buy 2 for 3.

It was once called by William Faulkner the most sincere and moving work of that era. The hero in it is too emotional, which always makes me discouraged, and I even feel that he is far less mature than Harry Potter.

But people will always grow up.The person who has changed a lot this time is me.I'm finally old enough to deserve this book.

Random House's vintage edition.The pages are yellowed and the font is small.

The first sentence of the opening is written like this: A story has no beginning or end... A story has no beginning and no end.

Wherever it starts, it's an almost absurd story for conventional morality.The lover Sarah left Bendrix and went back to her husband Henry for no reason, so Bendrix was in pain and anger, hired a private detective to follow her, and was mad because she smiled at a strange man.Then he found out that she was actually terminally ill.If the story ends here, it will be a Qiong Yao drama with too much literary talent.

The kind-hearted and generous husband Henry knew their relationship and invited Bendrix to move in with him, allowing Sarah to spend her last days without any worries under the care of the two.During this period, Bendrix gradually discovered the truth of her choice to leave him: in order to save his life, she exchanged their feelings with God.Facing the invisible but powerful God, Bendrix, who lost his lover, said to God in despair: You have done enough, and you have plundered enough from me.I'm too tired and too old to learn to love.You just leave me alone forever!
Sitting there beside Henry in the Victoria Gardens, watching the day die, Iremember the end of the whole affair.
The Chinese say that the long day will end, but this British man said watching the day die.

His paranoia, cynicism and cold sadness are like Xu Zhimo who lost Lin Huiyin.It's just that Xu Zhimo is a little more gentle than him.

This seemingly nonsensical story is a real fragment of the author Graham Greene's love life.

Her name is Catherine, and she is the C in "To C" on the title page of this novel.In and out of the book, the dull but kind and tolerant husband is called Henry.Intervening in other people's marriages and writing books with great fanfare seems to be a typical act of a successful villain.But after reading the book, you will know that Greene wrote this book not to show off, but to curse himself. For the rest of his life, he never got out of the shadow of this book.

"It's really sad and sad without a sound", compared to Bendrix who keeps shouting about love, hate, life and death in the book, Henry who is sitting in a strange tavern in a daze on a rainy night is always more touching.As a master of writing, why doesn't Greene know? Bendrix always laughed at Henry's dullness and dullness in his heart because of jealousy, but he couldn't deny that he became his reliance day by day, taking care of each other, "like two widowers".

In the study, Henry, who was disturbed by meeting an old acquaintance with Sarah, tried his best to hide his emotions, but was too excited to untie his shoelaces. Laughing at his clumsy fingers, Bendrix went over and knelt to undo his shoelaces.I think this is the reason why Graham Greene kept Henry's original name. He used this way to express the pain that Henry didn't show in his heart, and he also expressed his apology in this way.It is admitted that in this story, only Henry is right. Compared to him, Bandrix and Sarah, Greene and Catherine are just childish and selfish children.

Eight years after the book was written, in 1959, Catherine empathized and left Greene to fall in love with a monk.In the end she returned to England and died beside her husband. Greene lived in Italy for a long time, and the two never saw each other except for correspondence.

In this way, C is indeed taken away by God and death, just like the ending in the novel.In and out of the book, it's hard to tell who is who's avatar.

After C's death, Henry wrote back to Greene, thanking him for the books he had written, and would definitely meet him if he returned to England.By the end, the heroine is gone, and the two widowers really become friends.

It's also the same as the ending in the book.

(End of this chapter)