Chapter 55: Correspondence

Crying for too long made her consume too much water in her body, she drank a glass of water in 500 ml in one go, and then told me that she was going to sleep, let me do whatever I wanted, I could sleep anywhere except her bed. It was early in the morning, and the noisy urban villages were silent. I watched her fall asleep without even removing her makeup, tears still on her face, and her eyelashes were twisted into strands by dried tears. Although I haven't seen Hai Linlin sleeping, looking at this dancing girl under the light, she is more similar to Hai Linlin when she is asleep. For a moment, I even wondered if she was her, they were the same person, using both identities to go back and forth between the ballroom and the company, lingering in my life and life. She slept deeply, breathing evenly, like a child sleeping. I helped her take off her shoes, put on the quilt, and prepared to lay the bunk I slept on last time. She dreamed that I should not lay on the floor, and that I would have to blame her when I was sick, and she didn't mind that I slept next to her. The bed wasn't wide enough, and I was clinging to her, sideways to her, her back to me, my scary body pressed against her ass. My desire rose again, and the intense feeling of wanting to get Helen made me forget to think, and I reached under her armpits with my hands and grabbed her breasts. She pinched my hand hard and told me to respect myself and not do anything embarrassing. I knew she was determined and didn't force it anymore.

The next day, still not reeling from the desire she had aroused, I walked along the moat, facing the sun, and finally found myself in front of the painting workshop. I went to the piano classroom to take Mr. Liu's piano lessons, and I could come and go in that classroom at will, and several children remembered me, and they often used their spare time to ask me questions, all of which had nothing to do with the piano. I had lunch with her and then followed up with her class in the afternoon, knowing that I was just to pass the time and wait until the evening came. At twenty-one in the evening, when the classroom was finally gone, only the two of us were left, and I attacked her with a passion that I had never seen before, and she was startled and asked me if I was crazy and should not be in the classroom. I couldn't listen to anything, and let her hold the piano to unleash our passions, and the thrilling and morally corrupt feeling made us all have a lot of aftertaste. Just as we were getting dressed up and returning to normal, the door to the piano room was opened by the person who locked it. It was only afterwards that I felt scared that if someone found out, the consequences would be unimaginable.

I spent the night with her at a hotel in the city, and the next morning I took a taxi back to the company, and I was in a hurry to stay late. I and a few colleagues were assigned to the outdoor test that day, I was sleepy-eyed, as if I had not slept all night, unconsciously slept on a section of the testing line, my colleagues did not see me for a long time, two people returned to look for it, almost called the police. I was finally found in the water-soaked mud, and I remembered that I was still a dry patch when I collapsed there. Because of this incident, I was criticized by the supervisor, and the minister also knew about it, and criticized me by name for being lazy and irresponsible on the company radio that week. The broadcast content of the company's park every Monday is broadcast by Hai Linlin. My colleagues and I had lunch at the cafeteria at noon, and at the last minute on the radio, Hai Linlin read my name and the decision to punish me. This is the second time I've heard her say my name, the first time was when she first learned my name in the school library a few years ago. That time she said word by word. This time, it was said together with the punishment decision, without the slightest mix. I knew in advance that she was going to say my name, but when I actually heard it, I still chuckled, and my chopsticks almost fell to the ground.

I was the focus of the company's campus for a while, and almost everyone knew about a long-haired worker in workshop No. 5 who was working outdoors in a muddy field, waking up with his teeth chattering. At first, I felt embarrassed and shy, but I didn't mind it anymore when I listened to it both openly and secretly. On a Wednesday morning, the workshop director approached me and asked me if I knew why there were no female colleagues in the workshop. I replied to him that because women can't do this, it's easy to get a tan when they go out.

"Because the hair of a female colleague may be swept into the machine." He said, "So, how could you possibly know? ”

I knew he meant something, implying that I cut my hair short. Actually, just a few days before he spoke, I had the idea of cutting my hair short, and on the day he said it, I was getting ready to get off work in the evening to get it cut. But as soon as he said that, I felt like I was forced to cut my hair, so I didn't do it, but put it off for another week. Until one day, the workshop director deliberately stuffed the mop into a discarded machine in front of me, the machine was turned off, there was nothing, and he kept shaking the mop inside, as if he had to make me think the mop was hair. So after work that night, I went to the barbershop and got a bald haircut. The next day, I was again in the spotlight of the park, and this time I was criticized by the minister for not paying attention to the collective impact at all.

I have always believed that there is a huge difference between the status of the workers in the office building and the workers in the workshop in the park, and most of the time they appear at the place where we work as superiors and point fingers at the work. Because of this situation, I have met Hai Linlin three times in the workshop, and each time it was a group of them who came into the workshop and said something high-sounding. And more of the time she is silent, silent, constantly memorizing things in her notebook, sometimes smiling slightly to the laughter of a group of people. I don't know if she's like that because I'm there, or if it's the same everywhere. Once, a group of seven of them looked at the workshop, and when they left, they wanted to shake hands with us one by one. In this way, my contact with Hai Linlin was inevitable, and there were only five people left in the workshop at that time, and she started shaking hands with my colleague on my left, and I stood in the penultimate position. When I was in front of me, she was expressionless, and she extended her hand to me in a friendly and polite manner, and I held her hand, but she didn't speak to me, nor to the few employees who shook hands, and the matter was over. It was the first time I touched her hand, and I was so impressed that I will never forget it.

I gradually learned about her work in the company, and their department has a total of six people, mainly responsible for the company's various promotional materials, planning advertisements, and information communication. There is a job that she is solely responsible for, that is, the company's internal publication that comes out on the 1st and 15th of each month, which is a folio newspaper called "Blue Star". The first time I saw that newspaper was a month after I joined the company, I saw it in the newspaper reading column at the entrance of the workshop, and I didn't pay much attention to it at the time. When I saw it for the second time, I accidentally found out that the name of the editor-in-chief was Hai Linlin, and she was also written in the column of the editor's position. I began to pay attention, and I watched every issue, and the thunder could not move. If the amount of news is insufficient, the content of the first page will be changed to readers' contributions, and various articles written by the company's employees will be distributed, including short stories, essays, poems, family trivia, travel diaries, etc. The company's news articles are all similar, the front describes the news content, the back sings praises, and the author is always two or three people, and the name is embellished in parentheses at the back of the text, which is not very attractive to me. I'm more concerned about the reader's contribution section of each issue, to tell the truth, the company's news is missing so much, sometimes it is long and redundant, and it is unbearable, so it is necessary to fill the content of a page with readers' contributions. The Reader's Contributions section occasionally has a few great articles, but that's not what appeals to me. The reason why I pay special attention is because the choice of those articles is all in the hands of Hai Linlin, and she decides which articles can be listed and which articles cannot be listed. It is precisely because of this that I want to analyze her by analyzing the articles she has chosen, to analyze her aesthetics, to analyze the direction she is concerned about, and to analyze her mental state. Every time I analyze it, I feel that I have something new, as if I have seen through her, but it seems that I haven't finished the analysis yet, and I am looking forward to the next issue. Sometimes it's hard to get along with it, and the next issue will be all boring business news reports. In addition to being disappointed and angry, I didn't even read the content of that issue.

Once, I saw a warm reminder in the middle of the bar, saying that if you have any comments and suggestions about this journal, you can send them to the editor-in-chief's mailbox, and the editor-in-chief's email address is left below. I knew it was Hai Linlin's mailbox, and there was an idea creeping up in my mind that made me excited. I applied for a new email address and sent her an email in a very polite tone. Tell her that every issue of "Blue Star" should have a page of letters from readers, and "Blue Star" should not only be a medium for conveying information from the top to the bottom, but also a platform for the whole company to show its style. At the end of the letter, I pinched a signature: Long Away. The next day, I received a reply to the email, and the content of the reply was full of official tone, pointing out at the beginning that comments and suggestions must be made in real name, and they should sign their own department and name. However, the reply still analyzed my suggestion specifically, saying that my suggestion was good, but the original purpose of the journal was to promote news.

I took out the letter that Hai Linlin had written to me at graduation and tucked it into Faust, and began to carefully compare it with the reply to the email. The handwriting of the email was certainly not correct, and the name and date of the email were only 199 words, and I carefully checked the wording and grammatical conventions of the two letters. Although I think the reply to that email was written by her, I want to be more sure and try to regain the feeling of reading her letter for the first time. After careful comparison and analysis, the wording and grammatical conventions of the two letters are very similar – I am even more convinced that the email is her reply.

I then replied to her with a rebuttal to her arguments. I suggested that the original intention of the publication of "Blue Star" was to promote news, but it should change with the situation, and the employees of the company obviously prefer newspapers with readers' contributions, and work and leisure should be alternated. She replied to my email three days later, thanking me for my attention and concern for the newspaper at the beginning, and saying that my comments were very good, but the principle is that things cannot be changed, everything must give way to the original purpose of the newspaper, and if there is too much news, there can be no readers' contributions. Finally, I re-emphasized that I should write my department and name, and said that if the opinion is adopted, there will be a reward. Of course, I don't care about the so-called rewards, I care more about what she thinks of the advice given to her by someone who claims to be a long time ago, how she reacts when she sees it, how she feels, whether she doubts me. This time, I didn't rush to reply to her, but waited for three days and wrote more than 1,500 words of reader feedback, with decisive words and sophisticated tone, like a teacher speaking to a student. This time, she didn't reply until the newspaper came out, and the current issue of the newspaper did not have a single page of readers' contributions, and the news was long and long, which leaders did what and which workshop they inspected, as if they were deliberately against me. Some news has no meaning, and meaningful news is verbose, which is completely inconsistent with the characteristics of concise and capable words and sentences used in press releases.

This upset me, and I resent the unanswered email, hoping to get her attention and regain my self-esteem between me and her. After that, I felt that I was still not satisfied, so I reissued another one, bluntly saying that the newspaper was rotten, and I used words and sentences such as "nondescript", "shoddy", "messy", and "a disappointing newspaper". When it was sent, I was overjoyed. I don't think I'm going to be angry about it, I just want to hear or see how she reacts to it. It only took half an hour to reply to the email, first apologizing for not responding to the email in time last time, and saying that the content of each issue of the journal was discussed in detail by the staff of their department. The reply was written in a different tone, implicitly affirming their team and their work, and criticizing my opinion. As I did in previous letters, I was still reminded to write down my department and name so that they could come to me to discuss it in person.

Although the reply was rejecting my advice and suggestions, I was still happy because the letter made her take it seriously, and I believe that she would not change the content of my letter because of me, but just made me satisfied with the reply. I could see her sitting at her desk looking at the computer, frustrated or annoyed by my endless feedback, and then writing back to me in a cultured and official tone. I continued to write to her, always unable to avoid the publication, and she always replied to every letter, and I admired her dedication and seriousness. It also makes me feel guilty at times - bothering her in this way all the time. But this hide-and-seek style of communication and discussion kept me hooked, and arguing with her in emails that was almost pointless was the greatest joy of my life during that time. But as if to boycott me in action, there were no readers in five consecutive issues of the newspaper. The e-mail discussions were intermittent, sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes once every two weeks or so, until September, not because my suggestion worked, but because the semi-monthly newspaper was upgraded to a bi-monthly magazine, with a 16-carat print of between twenty and forty pages, bound on saddle nails, and a column of readers' contributions for each issue. The name of the editor-in-chief and the U.S. edition position is still her.