2022/07/10 02:06
Gravel and seawater were cast together into my passion for love. It was born in loneliness, in melancholy, in the void of having lost everything, and then it flows and subsides in rhythms that follow no rhythm. I live each day by a processed version of it, but in its original form it may belong only to some far-off coastline.
2022/07/11 02:26
A piano is moored somewhere inside me, pointlessly repeating the repeated passages while I think. In the void, my soul leaves my body and watches the world, watches the self curled up in hiding. My restless feet grip the pillow; my hands are laid reverently before my phone, and the posture of typing is like offering prayers to a god. But when the last point of light dims, I set out on the path toward dreams; the sounds still remaining in my ears gradually retreat from me, and I walk in stumbling steps toward a strange door I have never seen. Time is distorted before that door, space begins to overlap, and my consciousness and senses splinter into fragments. Dreams — a string of pearls of unknown origin, picked up by chance on the beach; the patterns on the shells trace out the shape of my soul.
Someone wants to talk to me.
2022/07/11 23:37
Cycling in the open air, and a freight truck roared past beside me. I seemed to see the bound cargo staring at me, forming an overwhelming black wall of sound from dense whispers, sending out a heavy, desperate wail in my direction. I felt suffocated. A thought flared and vanished in my mind in an instant; in a moment the truck was no longer on that empty road, but those rustling sounds still echoed in my ears. Another blank: street, echo, history. But the pressure and pain that hit me head-on from beside the truck remain vivid in memory forever.
2022/07/12 02:17
People on the subway gradually filled the space around me again; a large number of people were breathing alongside me on Shanghai Metro Line 9, breathing the enclosed air filtered through masks. Epidemic control announcements reached my ears mechanically, and alongside them came Dios’s “Touhikou”. I carefully attended to the precision of the lyrics and the song, and in the face of another’s success, I sank into a haze of confusion.
When the song ended, I looked up and scanned the people before me in their various postures. Nearly everyone had their head down, looking at a screen, and each was going through their own distinct life. From the corner of my eye: the young woman in white beside me had been tapping furiously at her screen; the old woman in front was crouching for a rest; the man with glasses at the far left was leaning against the glass with his eyes closed. I didn’t turn my head to look at any of them, only because I didn’t want to draw looks of contempt. Yet in that same moment I felt the urge to be noticed, hoping the people around me would gaze at me with respect or admiration. I knew well that the young woman in white had leaned on my shoulder by accident — she’d lost her balance when the train started. But I couldn’t help speculating about her motives, imagining her psychology, picturing the conversation that might have unfolded between us. In reality she was just a stranger I would encounter only once in my life; she may not have seen the upper half of my face above my mask, and I hadn’t even seen her face. What kind of mental state is this? I thought about it. Was it precisely because of this strangeness and fragility that there was for me a kind of spontaneous beauty — or was it a projection of desires I had long suppressed? I couldn’t find an answer, and was overtaken by a long, dull sadness. As I straightened up and prepared to escape from the crowd, I saw the crouching old woman spring suddenly upright and lunge for the empty seat I was vacating.