I hurriedly said goodbye to my model and took a taxi back to the half-demolished yard, looking at the ruins inside, reminiscing about the bits and pieces of the past here. I kept Qiu Pei in my brain, which made the feeling of loneliness that night even stronger, and with me, I believed that I must have come back with a purpose, and I would surely find in it the mystery that I could not understand in my life. I looked at the three paintings I held in my arms, and then at the half of the wall that was leaking out of the half of the room, and I felt that I needed to draw a scene. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was eager to paint, that I needed to paint urgently, and that I had a deeper understanding of painting. At that time, I also remembered what Hai Linlin told me about painting in the library, and she also inadvertently deeply understood painting and was deeply fascinated by it. "There are some strange things in the world that are always seen and understood by people inadvertently," she said. ”

The painting in my mind became the most important thing, and on the plane back, as I got farther and farther away from the city, I began to conceive of a rough prototype of the painting. I've figured out what I'm going to say, but I'm not sure how to express it. At first, I wanted to paint a large scene, a lonely figure standing in an abandoned courtyard, surrounded by broken bricks. The painting lasted seven days, and when the obvious outline came out, I felt that the style and the meaning were too generalized and conceptualized, so I gave up halfway through and threw the painting in the trash. I finally decided to paint a picture of a man leaning against the wall of a half-room, trapped in memories of the past, leaning against three tattered frames.

With a reborn understanding of painting, I threw away the four first drafts and finally continued to draw step by step on the fifth draft. I chose the location of my painting in Yingxiu's newly bought house, which has not yet been renovated, and only has a set of my painting supplies. Every weekend or occasionally after work, I go to draw a few strokes, carefully consider how to draw the next stroke, and if my mind is stopped, I don't force myself to think, but one day when inspiration comes, or go with the flow to come up with a reasonable method, and then continue to paint. I continued to paint until the spring of last year, when Yingxiu's house was ready to be renovated, and I chose to paint in a rental house that resembled Hai Linlin's dancing girl. I never wanted to paint in my dorm room or somewhere in the company, I didn't want my colleagues to know that I was painting a protracted painting, and one of the most important reasons was that it was likely to reach Hai Linlin's ears.

I moved my painting tools out of Yingxiu's new house, and it took a lot of trouble to find a new place, but I really couldn't think of a good place to go, and finally decided to go to the dancing girl who looked like Hai Linlin to paint was also a temporary decision by chance. We haven't seen each other since that unsuccessful assault on her, we haven't been in contact with each other, and I haven't remembered her new phone number. I felt that I had no face to look for her again, but then I felt compelled to face my mistakes, and I went to the door of the black ballroom for many days, hoping to see the familiar figure, but she seemed to disappear and never appeared in that ballroom again. I didn't see her until I went downstairs where she lived, and I didn't see her for the first three days, and I thought she had moved from there, or had left the city. When I went on the fourth day with the last attempt, I saw her come back drunk at twenty-three o'clock, looking for the key at the door for a long time, and then staring blankly at the messy street. I walked quickly over to her.

"Do you want my help?" I said.

She turned her gaze and her mind from the street to mine, and although she was drunk, she recognized me at a glance, and her once drunken eyes turned into a mixture of surprise and resentment.

"I'm never going to let a madman help. She said, "I'm thankful that you're far away from me." ”

I took her bag from her hand, helped her find the key to the electronic lock, and when I opened the door and went up, I asked her if I could go to the room, and she said that I had started to be polite to her, and I hadn't been there. When she entered the house, she collapsed on the bed, without taking off her clothes or shoes, and fell into a deep sleep. And I'm still on the floor where I used to live. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at me, and she had obviously woken up for a long time, changed her clothes, and washed her face. We had breakfast together, and after talking about what we had done for so many days without seeing each other, she went to another black dance hall to earn money, earning fifty to eighty dollars a day higher than before. She had met a man in the ballroom who claimed to be a steel construction company, whom she had once identified as a man with a biased hairstyle that was popular in the last century, a suit that didn't match the atmosphere of the ballroom, and the occasional cigar-like cigarette in his mouth. He told her that he was in love with her and wanted to have a relationship with her that would never break up. She bluntly said that she thought what he said was too funny: "Only minors say that." She always kept his courtship at bay, as if there should be no such man, but when he danced with her, she behaved submissively, just like she would with any other dance partner, and she said that it was her work ethic and professionalism that constrained her. He paid her five times the price each time, and at first she accepted it - she deserved it. But in the end, it turns out that he is exercising a strategy to make her fall into his trap, and the more he accepts, the more justified the other person will be when he says certain demands. Therefore, she counted the previous accounts and returned him two thousand one hundred dollars. He tried to ask her out every time he finished dancing, but it never worked, and the Black Dance Hall was the only place they had met and talked.

"He's just going to have a bed with me. She said, "Just like you." ”

I told her that I had a reason, and that a person who wanted to be a woman and a person who was a woman did not mean that she was morally corrupt, on the contrary, they made this request because they faced themselves calmly and showed themselves completely and unreservedly. I saw her to apologize to her, but I forgot because I was chatting, and I couldn't remember it until the end. But her long absence reminded me of my painting, and I told her that I wanted to borrow her room for a while to finish my long-lasting painting. She said she didn't spend much time there anyway, so let me do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't go to her bed and didn't spill paint on the floor. Her room is the place I spend the most on weekends, and sometimes during the week when I have an inspiration, I'll rush to her room after work, add a few strokes, and then rush back to work before the last train stops. During the time I was painting in her house, I saw her only a handful of times, she was like a ghost of an unknown world, always flashing in front of me when she appeared, sometimes to pick up something, sometimes to come back and sit by the bed, to make an inexplicable phone call. Every time, he greeted me with the same greeting: "Painter, here you are again." I would always answer her with the same words: "A few more strokes." ”

During that time, rumors about me or being a virgin began to circulate in the company, and I never knew who the rumors started from and when they began, and I felt that I was the last person in the company to hear this rumor. One time I heard someone talking in the dining room where there were three men and five women sitting at that table, and they didn't know that I was right behind them. They were very eloquent, and the discussion was lively, saying that I was a fossil. In the end, rumors branched out, one of them was that I was only interested in the public opinion and universal values, and that I could only suppress and forbear in public opinion and universal values; some people said that I was not functional enough to complete certain human activities; and some people said that I was loyal to love and had always kept a child frame for a woman. When I painted in the seaside city five years ago, this kind of rumor made me immune, especially after I had a skin-to-skin relationship with many Neodymium people, and experienced different life perceptions and body bowls, I became even more disdainful of this matter.

And this rumor reflects two values that are beneficial to me, one is that no one knows about what I did outside, and the other is that this rumor will reach Hai Linlin's ears. When she knew that I was still a Virgin, she would have denied the first branch of rumor entirely—I wasn't interested in it. She's only going to aim at the second and third possibilities, which is that I might have a problem with some aspect of my body, and that I'm keeping a child frame for the sake of a Neodymium man will be a message for her that is full of life philosophy - to let her see the past again. I didn't feel angry or shy about this rumor, and I never showed excessive shyness or uneasiness in front of my colleagues, but I talked to them every day with a smile, took the initiative to water the green plants planted between each block, and cleaned the work table. On the contrary, they behaved differently, their eyes wandering or full of curiosity, as if they were bothered by the rumors and not me. In fact, for a middle-aged person who is standing at an age, I think that I have indeed entered middle age, and the identity of the employee will indeed attract some attention, but it will never be discussed by the company's employees. But being unmarried, having zero experience in a relationship, living a simple life, only running and soaking in the library every day, and hiding somewhere to do unknown things every weekend, all the signs point to an inexplicable conclusion. I even whispered in my heart when I heard or knew what they were saying, that they were walking on the path of what I wanted to achieve, and that they were redrawing a beating note in my heart for Helen and re-entering her inner world. I don't know what she thinks about it, how she will react when she knows it, I guess all kinds of possibilities, but each one seems to be correct, and all of them seem to be incorrect, and in the end I am glad that just letting her know about it, and that this thing will make her guess.