The thick carpet, now yellowed with age, bears the marks of the passage of time. As the music from the vintage phonograph echoes through the room, nestled inside an ergonomic polyester shell, dust particles dance in the beams of light. Looking out through the bay window at the slow-moving boats on the lake, the only sound besides the hum of the old incandescent lamp's rectifier is the noise of nocturnal creatures in the darkness.
Under the neon lights, colorful images roll and play recklessly on the solemn crimson hall carpet. A glass of green mint juice spins in a circle and then escapes through the door unnoticed. Lazily reclining in a bed of cassia seeds, only the hand holding the controller is visible until the moment the CG animation ends.
On the other side of the rainbow, white snowflakes fall like petals, and the house on the waterfall is left in silence. The waves gently lap against the long coastline of the ghost island, and in the early morning, the clear blue lake reflects the image of the reed beds like a mirror. Along the misty banks of the Xuanwu Lake, the whispering of the willow trees can be heard in the gentle breeze; on the shimmering Suzhou River, light and shadow playfully weave through the alleyways. Sitting at the highest point of this huge city, overlooking the buildings below like a toy box, the heart breaks with each day's hopeful expectation, until it is shattered in a glass jar and thrown away, accompanied by the sound of wind chimes. Getting lost in the bustling night market, and watching half of the destiny talisman blown away by the wind, a sigh is all that is left.
The hypnotic world is a nostalgic throwback to the early 90s, with high contrast memories that surpass Robert Sheckley's subtle humor. In the murky pond of the stormy world, unknown creatures extend their long feeding tubes, searching for the fuzzy balls curled up in the cubic space, dividing and merging, dividing and merging, before burning to ashes on the morning after the frost and fire, and falling into a golden dream as slices of the city.
The Azure cufflinks bear crisp edges, as if just ironed. The Baader-Meinhof effect makes it 11:11 again when I glance at my watch. I try to steady my uneasy breath and then find sudden calm under the spotlight. The closed glass door suffocates me. I draw a smiling symbol with paint-stained hands in the mist, but can't see the other person's expression through the dim light. Even someone pretending to be tone-deaf can't tell which is more pleasing between C major and D major. Amateur Lin Kunxin can create notes like Rain while casually playing his sheng and xiao. We search for small patterns in the chaotic sea of metadata and get lost in the binary melodies of sound waves on the spectrogram. Predictable randomness and cold sensory cognition make me doubt its ability to pass the Turing test.
You make butterfly gestures with your hands but can't sing along with the Dinosaur melody. Even with proper characters, you can't always catch what you're after, as entropy is an irreversible dynamic process. The result is not just the flip of a coin and the process is not just the black and white keys of a piano. The curly-haired kid in the spider web grows up and almost becomes someone she once ignored in her new band. The context can easily change the meaning of a word, luckily without having to cling to a telephone line against a cold wall. Black cat Mae can't save Alec's life. When you close the book, you forget the story of the Rakuen, which is the demon in the hearts of those who go to the moon.
If asked to choose a favorite book, I would definitely pick Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's "Happier," not the Chinese version with a title that could easily be mistaken for a self-help book, nor the happiness course at Harvard that throws in an academic jargon every five minutes. After a long period of psychological training, I have managed to maintain an extremely positive mood for about 355 days out of the 365 days in a year, and have been able to sustain it for over nine years.
"What about the remaining ten days?"
"Just talk to a stranger, like today."
"Am I that stranger?"
"Anyone who speaks to me less than fifty times a year is a stranger."
"Why fifty times?"
"That's not the point."
I wish to finish the rainbow and let it bask in the sunlight, and not close it off; then fill it in with a 6B pencil, black like Hugo's pupils. Year after year, the wish is nothing more than another sense of ritual, fluctuating like emotions. Sitting on the edge of a wooden walkway, feet dangling, with giant and smooth reefs below, breathing deeply in the lingering twilight, the memories gradually distort and deform, like cold and indifferent skin, like a clear but confused face, like the crisp sound of ping-pong, back and forth, tick-tock, until the cardiogram becomes a straight line.
It is another special and quiet day, as calm as the past 9,590 nights. Perhaps, after giving up the most precious thing in one's life, one can no longer feel any fear. Collapsing into a singularity in the butterfly effect, disappearing in the quiet waiting. Full of confidence, because there is nothing to lose; filled with awe, because chasing the same vision. Time is both fleeting and endless, and fortunately, we have chosen the same journey.
And this is our narrative poem.
