I

I stepped out of the door I hadn’t opened in half a month and entered a world my senses had grown unfamiliar with.

I seemed to have forgotten how to walk outward. I watched the turning of this world with curiosity. Just across from my door is a small patch of greenery; while cooped up at home I would sometimes look out at it, but I hadn’t felt the intimacy of watching it breathe right before my eyes. I hadn’t paid much attention to the state of the trees during my time shut in, but now their forms were leaping before me, green becoming the breath of life pouring into my suffocated chest. Leaves: an extraordinary vitality and beauty. I handled the leaves, listening to birdsong. Following them upward, sunlight poured out its energy; the blazing bright edges reflected in my pupils, spreading a vivid gold.

My vision sharpened; the energy lost from being shut inside for so long seemed to come back to me. I breathed in an air that felt different, peaceful. The air held no trace of the taken-for-granted or of brooding — it moved freely and clearly through this formless space. I had been starved of air.

The low stone wall by the pond brought on nostalgia. I call it low because I’ve grown taller over the years. I studied the patterns and creases on the stone bricks. These layered bricks had witnessed the joys and indignities of my childhood, smiling quietly in some corner of my mind. Now they too were decaying and crumbling, but new patterns, new creases had formed on their surface, distorting the whole low wall, making it more unfamiliar to me. Through those new creases flow my memories, knotted into clumps, trembling and oscillating nonlinearly in the depths of consciousness, letting the faint song of the soul swell within me at some random auspicious moment — after the vanishing of a dream, or in the midst of time’s dissolution. Reserved and cool in its strangeness, constantly crumbling yet always standing, always beautiful — this mottled red-and-gray stone wall that looks so unremarkable is the concrete form of my inner contours.

The sound of water spilled over too, surging before my eyes. No one nearby.

Time! I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, letting the fragrance of flowers and grass cleanse my stale nasal passages. This space no larger than a soccer field was enough to free me from the message-demons lurking behind their passwords; I could experience the world in its original form, I could recover my authentic thoughts!

Thinking of original intentions, my nose pricked with feeling. As people walking and noise appeared before me, my phone materialized in my hand without my noticing.

II

I entered the next enclosed space, one that was constantly in motion.

Beyond the car windows flowed a feast for the eyes. The blue of the sky was pure and far-reaching, and sunlight as an illumination system far outperformed artificial light. Moving through the rare openness of wide views gave me a pleasure entirely different from home — something intimate, a pleasure of merging with the world. The scenery kept changing with the car: faded shop signs, jarring poster color schemes, thoroughly mediocre banners — from each of them I could read scenes of some ongoing drama, some intoxicated or hallucinatory.

If you looked down over the road from above a developed city, you would see countless vehicles crisscrossing. These individuals moving along the roads form the surface of society. The car is the definitive semi-private space; inside one, I don’t have to worry about a privacy screen on my phone, I can take off my shoes and stretch out across the back seat, I could even play 18+ audio through the speakers without trouble. “It is also a residence, but an exceptional one — an enclosed domain possessing intimacy, yet freed from intimacy’s usual constraints, with strong formal freedom and dizzying functionality.” (Baudrillard, The System of Objects) Now I drove out from home with mixed feelings, wrapped up in the mass of cars. I stopped at the solemn red light of an intersection and easily pried open a canned Sprite, using the fizz’s sound and sensation to cool the summer multiple times over. When my lips left the rim and I set the can down, an unspeakable, unpleasant feeling took root in me.

Raindrops fell; the blue of the sky was gradually supplanted by white. The raindrops crouched on the windshield were killed by the wipers; rain on the side windows had already run dry, leaving only the large flat drops on the sunroof motionless, mocking me through the glass, their edges hovering over my head like crow’s wings. I found that the rain wasn’t the only thing mocking me — human gazes were also shooting through the car windows like rays of light. A bus pulled up beside me. The car’s peace was shattered without mercy; I was at a loss, like a lamb gone astray. I shifted my hand on the steering wheel, trying to look unaffected, my breathing quickening. The me in my mind had been placed on a dissection table with dozens of spectators, and they were spectating inside my mind. The image of the dissection table made me think of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and I fell into a brief paralysis of perception, until the sound of a car horn made me realize the light had turned green.

III

An enclosed space, and one that was constantly compressing.

The chaotic circular reliefs lining the corridor walls and the photos processed through a cheap purple filter worked in unison to form a unique assault on my aesthetic sense. Despite the air conditioning, the breath of strangers filling the space made me feel hot. Not one inch of this place belonged to me; all it left me was a thick sense of insecurity.

←Toward Jinhai Road Toward Qishen Road→

Signage like a game — symbols expressing so-called “freedom of choice.”

I turned my phone brightness all the way down, simulating the effect of a privacy screen. My eyes, barely able to see the content, had to simultaneously remain alert to the gazes of the hundreds of people around me.

The LED screen, composed of pixelated points of light, scrolled; arrows blinked.

I didn’t know when my wandering gaze would land on another person, even as I tried to keep my eyes moving at random.

The glass window on the subway door reflected the light inside the car. My own face looked completely unfamiliar.

Another stop. Passengers swarmed in like beetles, dense and carrying sounds I found unpleasant. Four or five people were clutching the metal pole that had been giving me comfort. My stomach lurched suddenly. A wave of nausea rose through my throat like the crowd surging in.

気持ち悪い.
Disgusting.

Their fingers, oozing sticky sweat, reached in from different directions, enclosing the thick metal pole. Their arms extended to their bodies like tree branches; I trembled quietly in the shade of this canopy, anxiously guessing in the shadows whether disaster was coming or not. My throat filled with sudden pressure, the things before my eyes began to spin, and I felt an extreme, violated discomfort.

Donglan Road. I stepped onto the escalator in a panic. I didn’t dare turn my head, so I fixed my eyes on the floor and moved upward, passing all the people standing still on the escalator. The air relaxed slightly; it was no longer full of unfamiliar breath. I passed through the subway exit gate, like walking out of a nightmarish prison.

The Exit 2 sign blazed painfully bright, engraved with unspeakable things. I dragged my dizziness through the streams of people coming and going; the stone tiles on the ground silently saw me off. Air-conditioned air and hot wind crossed paths; my mask was fastened tightly to my face. A familiar announcement rang out; I placed my hand on the railing. From below to above, the sunlight at the subway exit gradually suffused my tiny body.

Sunlight, carrying a pale gray of despair.

I felt a supreme terror at the vastness of the sky hanging above my head. Metal lines rose from the ground and aimed straight at the murky sun; the wailing of the wind cut through the noise-cancellation in my headphones, and against the backdrop of people scattering in all directions, shadows spilled out too, pouring the ground into gray. Suddenly, a crash of thunder broke across the sky, and those eyes, fixed on the violet rays plummeting down, let out saltwater tears. I finally came apart in the human world.