Even though I hadn't seen him for four years, I recognized Yingxiu at a glance, he was much taller and thinner than the last time I saw him four years ago, and his long years of life in the south had made him dark-skinned, and when I saw him at the exit of the station, it felt like I had seen a two-dimensional image of a person cut out of cardboard.

He also recognized me at a moment, he was less than 1.65 meters tall when he graduated from high school, and now he is taller than me, he said that he grew more than ten centimeters taller in just three months in the year he graduated from high school. He is no longer as introverted as he was in high school, but has become lively, enthusiastic, and talkative. On the bus to where he stayed, he showed me everything about the city.

He spent four years in the city, spending his weekends and off-duty hours walking around the city, and was amazed at how well he knew everything, even knowing where a bus line started. In the time when he took me out to play, whenever someone asked him for directions, he always did not hesitate to say the best route and direction, without any difference. At first, I thought it was the reason he was walking around the city for a long time, but when he arrived in the city where my school was located a few years later, and it took him less than a month and two months to learn everything and every bus line in that city, I realized that this was a unique talent he possessed.

We were roommates in high school, and I don't know his whereabouts after graduation. The last time I saw him was on the day he filled out the volunteer form, and he didn't add it after receiving the volunteer form. At that time, the volunteer form was a machine-readable card, on which were arranged with numbers embedded in the squares, and the corresponding number codes of the corresponding colleges and majors were found in a booklet, and then the numbers were painted black with a 2B pencil. He didn't even check his college entrance examination results, and he didn't say hello to anyone in the dormitory when he left. When he left the dorm, I thought he was just going out for a walk, but I didn't expect it to be the last figure he had left in the dorm during his high school career, and his machine-readable card was scribbled on his bedboard without any futon.

At that time, mobile phones were not yet widely available, and I first left him three messages on the Internet, but I didn't get a reply, and I never left him again. A year later, I had already painted many pictures in the university studio before I received his reply to my three messages: I was fine, everything was fine, I was in too much of a hurry that day to say hello to everyone. And told me which city he was in. Originally, I don't remember it, but his reply text reminded me of my innocent friendship in high school, and I also replied to him: Well, I know, your machine-readable card was sold for scrap along with a bunch of books.

We haven't been in touch since. Friends are like that, we don't know when a casual greeting or figure is likely to be the last time we meet. It is very likely that those former confidants and friends will drift apart as we grow older and the years go by, until they fade out of our memories. When we think about it one day, it suddenly dawns on us that we once had such a close friendship. But sometimes this friendship is lost and regained, as if it is unconsciously diluted, and it will come back to us unconsciously, making us feel that we have gone back in time to those friendships that have lasted with the years.

When I was looking for the city I was going to, I remembered the city where Yingxiu was staying, and that city met all the conditions of the city I was looking forward to. But it's been four years, we haven't been in touch once, and when I occasionally think about my high school life, I find that he has a memory passage, but it is often only a flash. It was the city I chose that brought back more memories of him, and I tried to send a message to the same online account he had sent me messages from four years ago: "Where are you now?" I thought at first that he would wait until the next year to reply to my message like he did four years ago. But he soon returned: he was still in the same place. We left each other's phone numbers, and after more than four years, I heard his voice again — on the phone — and his voice never changed.

I told him I was going to his city in search of a bigger future, and I needed his help at first, and he said yes as if he had known about it many years ago.

He rented an old building on the edge of the city, which seemed to have been transported by time shuttle from my very young days, disappointing at its old age and amazed at how well it had been preserved. When I saw the scene inside, I deeply felt that not only can people not be disguised, but the connotation of architecture can also be hidden deeply. The décor of the house is simple and clean, there is not a single thing superfluous, and it is so beautiful that no one can find any flaws. Yingxiu told me that it took him half a year to make it look like this. When he first arrived, the whole room smelled as if it had been stored for a century, but there was no trace of dampness, cobwebs were everywhere, the walls were mottled like children who had just learned to paint with paintbrushes dipped in color, the rotten tables and chairs showed the cold, and the floors were covered with thick dust, revealing a few footprints that could be seen at a glance as having been stepped on by leather shoes a long time ago. The landlord charged him a monthly rent of one-tenth of the average price in the city.

"It's like a haunted house for disgusting people," he said.

On the first day he tidied up his room, he caught a bottle of all kinds of insects alone. At first, he was going to release them all, which was his attitude towards life and life, but a bug bit his finger, which he didn't care about at first, and after just a few hours, his whole arm was numb, and his fingers were so thick that he couldn't even bend them. In a fit of rage, he dipped all the bottles of bugs in gasoline and burned them to death, and the crackling sound was incessant.

During the initial renovation days, he was crammed into the dormitory of the software school every night, attending classes during the day, and he only had two and a half hours a night to renovate, except for the time on the road. When he graduated from the software training course, the house was renovated, and after work, he lived there and never moved.

When I first arrived in that city, I was full of curiosity, and I traveled around the city with a map, and Yingxiu would be my guide on weekends, but most of the time I was alone. I also saw the river that ran through the city, much wider than the one near my school, and it flowed into the sea to the southeast.

The first time I saw the sea was on the fifth day of arriving in Yingxiu's city, and I took a two-hour bus ride and another hour's walk to reach the uninhabited seaside. The first time I heard the sound of waves crashing on the shore, the first time I saw a seabird swoop into the sea and pick up a fish and then soar into the sky, the sound of the wind mixed with the sound of the waves made the surroundings more empty and lonely, the occasional wave of sea water would wash a wave of dead fish ashore, and then the next wave would take them to bury them under the mud and sand, the waves would break the mussel shells on the rocks, and after a while a sea crab would crawl out of the crack in the stone and climb over my feet with tongs. A boat was tied to a stone mound that I could not reach, and judging by its appearance, it must have been iron. After I went back, I asked Yingxiu, why is there no one in such a good place?

"Do you think people are from the same hometown as you?" Yingxiu said: "They have lived here since they were children, and they have long been tired of watching it, so they left you a good opportunity to watch it alone." ”

Finding a job in that city is still difficult. I learned the lessons of looking for an internship and sent out a lot of resumes until I finally applied for a job related to my major. I made 11 resumes for myself, across various industries, and submitted them for different companies. I received 70 interviews, but only 15 were for painting or art. Yingxiu saw me who was about to go out for an interview, and called me back: "Yuqi, are you going to the interview like this?"

"Why not?" I asked him.

He got up from the sofa and looked at me as if he was meeting me for the first time: "Let's go, buddy, I'll take you out to prepare for the interview." ”

He took me to the city's largest clothing market, and in less than twenty minutes, after entering three stores, he chose a suit and a pair of black leather shoes for me, which was much more expensive than my ticket to the city, and for me, it was a lot of money. Yingxiu repaid the price to the store manager for half an hour, and I sat on a stool in the store without inserting a word. In the end, the manager of the suit was discounted by 7%, and I still didn't feel the need to wear such expensive clothes. Before I could say I didn't need to buy it, Yingxiu had already paid and packed the clothes.

"Don't be embarrassed, great painter. He said, "You still need more experience, things in society are much more complicated than in school." ”

The temperature of that city made it impossible for anyone to wear a suit, and on the days I was interviewing, I wore a white shirt, a pair of trousers, and a pair of leather boots. But that didn't bring me good luck, and I didn't pass all the fifteen interviews I attended, and the frustration was so similar to what I had tasted from Hai Linlin. I didn't look for a job for a few days, and I spent three hours a day going to the place where I first went to the beach, looking for comfort in the hustle and bustle of the sea crashing against the shore, watching the mussel shells shattered on the shore by the impact of the waves. Until the sun disappeared over the distant shoreline, and then when the sky was getting dark, I mentally estimated the time of the last bus, and then went back along the road I came from, listening to the sound of the sea fading and the noise of the city encroaching on my eardrums. Spend another three hours back in Yingxiu's room and spend another night on the sofa in the living room.