Chapter 2413 - 2234: Blossoms Blooming on the Other Shore (Part 2)

Chapter 2413: Chapter 2234: Blossoms Blooming on the Other Shore (Part 2)

Dad, do you know? I once read a book, and in it there was a line: I asked you for directions once in my life, and you waved to me once in yours!

I’m often moved by this kind of naked, slogan-like swelling of feeling, and at the same time I feel a kind of sorrow for today’s young people, because they’re all busy swapping names back and forth on the Internet, and genuine honesty in love has long since vanished; with no real love left, there’s only sex. Over and over, I wonder how I’m supposed to live. When I’m so furious at myself I can’t breathe, no matter what he does, no matter what he says, I just like him; no matter how unworthy they think my wife is of me, I just like her, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Those subtle looks in their eyes tell me they think I’m an utterly unreasonable freak—fine, a monster then, let me be a monster; beauties fall in love with beasts too. I comfort myself: in truth I’m just a Prince who’s already been placed under a Magic spell. Deep in my heart, the one I love will always be my wife, and that will never change. Time and again I trail behind my wife, following her; I searched for her for ten years—ten whole years I never forgot her, because I kept looking for her countless times. I want to know where she actually is, I want to know what she’s turned into now, I want to know whether she still remembers me at all.

Whenever I’m faced with all these trees, I feel like every one of them is a pitiful child, because that’s the only way I know how to define them, and defining them like that makes me feel like I’m some seasoned, world-weary monk who has seen through the ways of the world. Only heaven knows how many years younger than those trees I actually am, knowing nothing of human affairs, just like the people in the Peach Blossom Spring who don’t know how to pose in front of a camera, sing without any gestures, go on stage to receive an award and don’t understand that they should thank the company, say "thank you, everyone," before stepping down.

But I’m exhausted from being alive, and they, in turn, show a tendency to break outward, to breach the walls. Their sound is simply the voice of big boys, young men; they’ve had no professional training at all, and yet I can even hear where they’ve remembered something wrong. This raw and simple voice often gives me a plain, weighty kind of emotion.

I always feel the trees are talking to me every time. I hear the tree telling me she’s a little autistic, that she likes to sing and doesn’t like to say that she likes music; that his own dear daughter doesn’t like crowds, that people are cold, animals are kind, and human beings are dangerous; that she hides her eyes behind her long hair so she won’t see this world too clearly; that he is moved, feels blessed and in pain, not for his own hard life, but for certain people and certain things. When I listen to these trees speaking, deep inside I find myself thinking of youth that is sorrowful yet beautiful, of an age that is passionate yet lonely. I’m nothing more than someone who has borne all the devil’s training alone. All of this has long been everything I was meant to bear; I have absolutely no way to escape, no way to make any of it change, no way to pretend none of it ever happened. This is my fate, everything my life was destined to contain, forcing me to endure such an ending.

I know that the musical undercurrent beneath the trees is loneliness, utter and complete loneliness. This loneliness is not the loneliness of standing alone on a desolate earth after the end of the world, staring up at a moon so huge it’s terrifying; it’s the loneliness of standing amid a crowd that darts about like fish, looking all around in a daze. The former is despair; the latter is a cruel kind of despair. I’ve wondered before if one day I’ll become like that myself. I once read a short story: after the end of the world, the only person left alive sits alone in a room, and suddenly there’s a knock on the door. I often imagine what that person would feel the moment the knocking sounded—fear, confusion, joy; perhaps all of them, perhaps none. I think that person is the tree, guarding the earth in solitude, and that’s why it rejects the outside world so fiercely.

When I realized that the inborn helplessness inside the singing voice is something you can never learn, my heart was crushed. I truly feel that the tree is the most tragic of all; she lives more miserably than I do. She stands there, with no one caring what she has been through; she can only guard her post in silence, alone, with no way to ever leave. I don’t understand how sometimes, in the cracks in the rocks, those flowers can still rise up. The rise of the flowers is nothing short of a miracle, because they are China’s first underage band. But how am I supposed to know just how deep my own pain runs? Time and again I’ve climbed to the peak of life, and just when it’s time to break through, I start downhill; without exception, it always ends in death. My only wise move is to charge ahead into the rapids, yet the result is the same—only the manner of dying is a little more gorgeously staged!