I spent all the money I earned from my internship, and the money that Mr. Ou bought my graduation project. I lay on the couch in Yingxiu's living room, playing with the last remaining coin over and over again, throwing it towards the ceiling and catching it with my hand. I tried to throw the coin with a lot of force just to hit the ceiling, but not so hard that it hit the ceiling. The coin ended up on the floor and rolled under the couch, and I didn't bend down to look for it.

I was embarrassed to borrow money from Yingxiu, and when I woke up the next day, there was a wad of money on the table in the living room, and Yingxiu left a note next to it: "I've been here for so long, and I've spent about the same." I saved some money and I went on a business trip for a week to take care of my home. ”

It was the first time I felt so desperately that I needed a sum of money to make ends meet. Three days later, I showed up on a fishing boat, and I think that was my first job, and I was able to get on that boat because the captain was also a painter, and after his dream of being a painter was knocked down by continuous poverty, he started a fishing business.

"Young man, I know you don't know anything about this, but that's okay. When the captain allowed me to get on board, he said to me, "You should look at something bigger to understand how the painting is made." ”

It was my first time on a boat and my first time in the ocean. My job was simple, to put the fish I caught in the freezer with a swarthy and sturdy young man.

At first, it was a problem to stand firm on the rocking boat, but when I slowly got used to walking on the rocking boat, the fishy smell of the first fish we caught quickly filled the entire hull, and then the fish that were pulled up to the deck were even more desperate to exud fishy, the unstoppable smell was like the ship was cursed by the god of the sea, I vomited once on the boat, holding on to the guardrail and desperately spitting the filth into the blue sea, watching the filth I spit out slowly dissipate with the undulating waves. I feel sorry for the struggling fish and feel that they are somewhat similar to me.

We fought the fish at sea for many days, and I remembered the time for the first two days, and after I got used to life on the boat, I could no longer remember how many days had passed. The rocking boat made me sleep so well that sometimes I woke up to the red sun on the sea level, and it was hard to tell whether it was morning or dusk. It wasn't until I remembered that I had just come from the night that I was sure it was sunrise, and I quickly got to work with the crew.

One night, I guess five or eight days later, the captain sat me with him on the bow deck, and the moon hung in the sky, and the stars above me were clean and bright, as if they had just been washed out of the sea and embedded in the sky. The captain was holding a bottle of wine.

"Why do you want to find a job in the labor market for sea fishing?" asked the captain, "before you came to this city, you had never even seen the sea, you couldn't even swim." ”

"One is because I love the sea. I said, "Besides, I need to earn some money." ”

"It is very taboo to bring people on board who have no experience at sea. The captain said, "But do you know why I let you on board?"

"Why?" I asked, "I thought no one would take me on board." ”

"That day in the labor market, I could tell at a glance that you were a painter. "Believe me, I have a strong sense of the person who paints, and it's like it's innate," he said. ”

He told me his story, he loved to draw since he was a child and dreamed of becoming a painter in the future. But his family did not have the conditions to support him to become a painter, and the tools and consumables for painting were too expensive. However, his parents still used the money they saved to buy painting supplies for him, and he once wanted to go to the art school, but in the end he gave up completely because of the high cost of schooling.

He didn't go to college, but after graduating from high school, he came to work in the city where he is now, and at first he used his spare time to paint, sending part of his salary home, part of his life, and part of it to buy paintings. Until one day he came to the city and saw the sea, he knew that the real vastness was like this, he was sad about his old loneliness and remote lifestyle, he once dreamed of becoming a painter, but he was just immersed in his own world and never thought of coming out, he was extremely ashamed of his previous dream of becoming a painter.

"Only when you see something broader will your paintings, all your persistence, have a direction and meaning. It's not just because of poverty, I never cared about poverty. He took a sip of wine and said.

He threw away all his painting utensils and never painted again, he learned to fish with a fishing boat, hoping to blend into the sea and find a more mysterious and moving beacon of signs.

"I've been fishing for eleven years. He said, "I've always loved the sea." ”

"You don't fall in love with the sea and the fishing boats. I said, "You just hate the land." ”

"Say whatever you want. He said, "I want you to experience for yourself the true vastness that makes your efforts worthwhile." ”

He told me at the labor market that day that it would be very hard to fish, and that it would take about a month to go out. I told him that I had never been to the sea, that I couldn't even swim, and that I usually felt breathless when the bath water was buried above my chest. He said that you don't need to be able to swim to fish, only the fish that are being caught.

In the days that followed, I became familiar with almost everything on the boat that had to do with fishing, but I still did more to store the fish in the freezer.

When I came ashore, I felt like I had spent a year at sea, but the time on the calendar told me that I had only been at sea for twenty-eight days. Life without a sense of direction and time stretches time infinitely, and I was used to the feeling of dizziness from the rocking hull of the boat, and I only threw up once. But I never got used to the smell of the seawater, the salty smell of the seawater that splashed into my mouth like the blood oozing from the bitten lips, more like the feeling in my mind when Helinlin occasionally appeared in my head.

In the end, I didn't even feel the rocking of the boat until I got ashore and it felt like the earth was shaking, and I sat against the pillars by the pier in a dizzy feeling for as long as I was at sea before I gradually got rid of the shaking, and when I looked at my watch, I actually only sat there for more than three hours, watching the crew go about their work on and off the boat. On the first days of disembarkation, I couldn't even sleep in Yingxiu's living room, and when I closed my eyes, I felt the sofa sway like a narrow bed on a ship, and it took me a long time to fall asleep, and it was difficult to sleep soundly. I dreamed that all the fish we caught came to life and ate me bite by bite, and it took me a long time to realize that I was no longer on the boat but sleeping in the living room, and it would take a long time to tell the direction and where it was.

When the captain paid me, he said, "You have a great future, don't give up painting, don't fish." "Later, I met the captain three times at the labor market, and on both occasions he did not see me, and on one occasion we greeted each other.

My second job in the labour market was to help an environmental protection department salvage the garbage that was spilling into the shore as the sea spilled onto the shore, and I did that job for a week. Next, I scraped the scales of fish in a restaurant for three days, spent 15 days wearing more than 10,000 crabs on bamboo skewers for tourists to roast and eat, and worked as a security guard at a seaside hotel for more than a month. The labor market was the source of all my income, and I felt like I was back to the carefree, uneventful way I had been when I graduated.

I've been living in Yingxiu's living room, and when Yingxiu introduces me, she says, "This is my high school classmate, and he's a painter." Then the others looked surprised and uttered words of adoration. In the eyes of many people, painting is a noble profession, with a high social status, and an ideological realm beyond ordinary people. I told Yingxiu not to say that I was a painter in front of people, and Yingxiu agreed very simply, promising that next time it would never be. But when it came time to introduce me to someone else, he still asked me to appear as a painter. At first, I was embarrassed by this kind of painter and a little embarrassed. I knew I wasn't a painter, I was just an art graduate, but one thing was the same as most painters – I didn't have any money, I was poor.

Later, as a painter, I appeared more and more in Yingxiu's circle of friends and in that city, and the feeling of being self-conscious became less and less, until finally I even somewhat admitted that I was a painter. But in fact, since the portrait of Hai Linlin was completed, I haven't painted again, not even the tools to paint.