The plane landed at eleven twenty-five a.m., and I was used to the ground level that the plane was getting closer to when it landed, but I didn't see it this time. The plane jolted violently in the chaos, startling my complicated heart as I gradually returned to its old place, and when I looked through the visor, the plane was already slowing down and taxiing on the runway. I knew that the yellow chaos in the air was the haze, and the haze was so thick that I couldn't see the ground that was getting closer.

I heard on the news that the city was getting smog, and it was the first time I had seen it. I have been gone for three years, which is a short time and a long time, and in my memory I have always kept the impression of it in the time span of yesterday. Before I left that year, there had been no smog in the city, and in just three years, everything had changed. I stepped out of the door of the airport hall with my left foot, it was like the end of the world outside, the visibility was less than 20 meters, there was a peculiar sour smell wafting in the air, pedestrians wearing masks, looking indifferent and silent, and the whole city was lifeless and lethargic.

I took a taxi to the station, and then took a bus from the station back to my hometown. After a long absence, my hometown has changed a lot, the streets are paved with cement, the landscape trees I planted when I left have grown taller, and the edge of the ditch far away from the village has become steeper and wider because of the rain, and the road on the side of the ditch has collapsed to allow only one person to pass. The number of elderly people in the village has increased, and many of them seem to have aged overnight. In the three years since I left, twelve children were born in the village and nine elderly people died. When the three of them got married, they informed me on the phone that I must go back to their wedding, and they and I both knew that their emphasis on "musts" would be difficult to achieve, but they still had to say it to show the indelible friendship of playing with urine and mud. The only thing that remained unchanged was the scene after the snow, the moor was white, with the occasional hare running through the snow, leaving a trail of footprints on the snow, and the pheasant hiding in the grass that was not buried in the snow, frightened and fluttering into the air, and then landing in another pile of grass not far away.

It took me a long time to get used to the cold of winter in my hometown, and the southern sun did not make me darker, but fairer, and my relatives in my hometown would say that I was whiter when they saw me. Hair and beard were the first things that disgusted my mother, and when she saw my artistic appearance, which many people said, told me to put down my bag and go for a haircut, and if I didn't go back to normal, I wouldn't want to eat. I went to town to cut my hair short and shave off the beard that I had become accustomed to and proud of. In my hometown, no one thinks that a good man will dress up like a bum. The Spring Festival is approaching, and my marriage is on the agenda for the first time.

"You'll be twenty-seven years old," said the mother, "it's time to get married." ”

This was the first time I heard that I should get married, and until then, I had always felt that the so-called marriage was far away from me, as if marriage was always just something that happened to adults, and I was still young and not in the circle of marriageable age. But the truth is that I am almost three years old above the legal age of marriage, and I have two young children who have been born. Twenty-seven, in my hometown, is the golden age for marriage – and the age at which you have to get married. I had no concept, no feelings, no expectations about marriage. It's just that when I just graduated, I stayed in the studio with Hai Linlin, chatting with my back to the radiator, and the word marriage came to mind. At that time, the impulse and intoxication of love made me think of getting married for a while, and I couldn't think of getting married for a while. I thought about what it would be like to marry her, what would our lives be like? She just wanted to be a painter, she loved painting more than anything, and I had no desire to paint, and I didn't even want to do it again after graduation – but I did make a living from it in the first few years of my graduation. Whether what we collectively understand will lead us to sharp conflict or into dreamlike sweetness, and to become indispensable to each other, all of which is difficult to determine. But it was all just imagination, and I didn't even think to say what I thought to her at the time. It wasn't until I decided to leave the city, and from that moment on, the word marriage became even more alien to me, as if it had never appeared in the dictionary of my life. When my mother asked this question, I felt strange and frightened. The fear is not that I have become an adult, but that time has passed so fast, and I even thought of my life because of this, thinking that everyone will die one day, and silently calculating in my heart how old I can live, and I still have a teenager to live.

Like all children of the same age at that time, the parents' urging to marry is going on at any time, but it always requires too many hard words. What I believe is that my mother learned from the lessons of parenthood around her and instilled in me the concept of marriage at an early age, so that I could gradually accept the fact that I already needed to start a family. But I just think of it as something that doesn't need to be paid too much attention.

Everything was starting anew, and I needed to find a new job in the city where I went to school, and the past always seemed strange and familiar to the city. There are more vehicles and the floors are higher than ever. When the subway opened, it is said that on the first day of trial operation, crowded citizens trampled the escalator at the entrance. The city's newly formed team is named after the city, and every weekend when the home game is played, fans fence the road near the stadium. As I left, one of the largest parks in the city had been built, four kilometers long from north to south and two kilometers wide from east to west. Old people dance inside, young people play guitars. Couples hide in the dense woods on summer nights, thinking that others cannot see them. The bird swept low in the park square, the heavy rain washed the stone paved park path to the light, the illegal fisherman flashed a flashlight late at night along the lake in the park to find a target, a fisherman fell into the lake, the next morning the body was found by me who ran in the morning, I called the police. But the place where he drowned was less than a meter deep, and why he was drowned became a mystery that can never be solved. That park became my favorite place to visit during my free time from work.

It feels like everything has changed in the whole city, everything is changing, and the only thing that remains the same is the consistent accent of the citizens, and the fragrance of osmanthus wafting through the city every September.

When I first came back, the moment I came out of the airport, I felt a deep sympathy for the city, because it showed a temperament that was very similar to my own temperament when I left the city. I never thought about what kind of mental state and temperament I was in when I first left the city, until I returned to the city and realized that from the smog of the lifeless and silent city, I saw myself when I left three years ago.

Spring arrives, the weather warms up, and the whole city recovers, as if reborn. I regained my familiarity with the city, just as I did when I first started college. Work was still a priority, and in a city by the sea, I had saved some of my savings for my family, some of them for my family, and some of them for me to help me get through the job search, but I did the math that I could only squander that money for three months at most – prices in the city were at least a third higher than when I left.

The accommodation problem was the first and foremost problem for me to regain my foothold in the city, I couldn't stay in a hotel every night, and the high cost would quickly make me hungry. Friendship once again stepped forward to help me solve my urgent needs, as the provincial capital city of my hometown and the city of my alma mater, I have many friends here. At first, I didn't think about it, and I didn't think about how many friends there would be in the city, but when I searched for friends who might have been hit by time because of the accommodation, I found that there were a lot of friends, scattered all over the place, most of them were the same age as me, except for a few who had been married and had girlfriends, the others lived a free and easy bachelor life, carefree, enjoying the freedom that God had given them to have at this age, and also bearing the inevitable pressure of life at this age。

I spent a week in a rented house in an urban village, which was a prefabricated house built on the roof, and I had to go to the toilet twice a night in the cold of early spring. I once suspected that it was at this time that I contracted a stomach cold and spleen deficiency, and every time I changed seasons or suddenly entered the air-conditioned room, my stomach was uncomfortable. When I came back to see him half a year later, the inside of the house was hot and like a volcano.

After that, I stayed with a high school classmate who bought a house in a high-end community for half a month. He was handsome and charming, and only I knew that he had received thirteen love letters in high school, and I had accidentally seen one, and I was so impressed that I blushed as if the letter was addressed to me, signed "a man who has a crush on you". He had his first sexual experience in his sophomore year of high school, and the other party was a girl in a liberal arts class, and the girl was 1.75 meters tall. In the era of our high school, coupled with the fact that it was a relatively remote small county, the atmosphere was conservative and pure, which made many students envious. But when he came back that night, he was very depressed, he didn't say a word, he skipped class for a day, drank a bottle and a half of liquor, lay on the bed full of vomit and talked to himself, and wept alone. When he woke up the next day, he said the reason why he was sad: "The first time I was gone, she wasn't the first time, I was played by her." Still, he went out a few times with the girl for the night.

During the Chinese New Year, we met in the county, and his appearance was even more outstanding, and a young handsomeness made men not only have to love and pity him. He never told me what he did, and he came back every day with a drunken and haggard face, sometimes bruised and bruised. He lived alone in his huge three-bedroom house, and rarely interacted with others. We sat in his living room, and he always had a sad look on his face and I was discussing poetry and poetry like he had in high school. At least that time, he was the richest of our high school classmates I know and the first person to buy such a big house. Three years later, he returned to his hometown to get married, his wife was very beautiful, like a movie star, and the two lived happily.

During that time, I was looking for a job and a place to stay, unlike Yingxiu, where I could live for a long time, and I only lived in each place for about a week to half a month. Over time, I found this kind of life quite interesting, I reacquainted myself with my former friends, and then looked back on the old days, and I deeply felt that life is impermanent, and anything can happen. Some people have not changed at all, even their appearance is the same as yesterday, and some people have changed dramatically, fat or thin people are unrecognizable, and even their personalities are very different from before. Many people have worked in industries that they never thought they would have, and others would never have thought they would do.

Until the arrival of summer, the city was sweltering like hell, with the worst period of the day exceeding 40 degrees Celsius for seven consecutive days. I don't think it's the last resort to stay overnight, considering that I don't have a house, I don't rent a house, I leave my things at a friend's place, go online in an Internet café during the day to find a job, or sit on a bench by the lake in the park for a few hours in a row, and at night I just find a park bench to sleep on, mosquito bites, and I don't care about it. Until I was woken up by someone who got up early the next day and ran in the morning, and the sun was shining on me through the branches, I sat on the bench to sober my head, went to a place where there was water and washed my face hastily, and went to the place where my friends lived every two or three days to brush my teeth, wash my hair, and change my clothes. Transcendent, wandering the streets of the city, as if he is an existence beyond the world, more aware of things than anyone else, and seeing the essence of everything more clearly. Every morning, I watched the people hurrying to work, as if they were accepting their actions as if they were complaining about life as God.