There are three kinds of people: living in the future, living in reality, and living in memories. People who live in the future are radical, people who live in reality are determined, and people who live in the past are in a trance. It's hard to summarize what kind of person I am, that is, if I am one of those people today, I will probably be another kind of person tomorrow. A person like me lacks character charm and is accustomed to betrayal. Today betrays yesterday, and tomorrow will betray today.

I want to talk about what it's like to live in memory. Now I live in the city, in a three-bedroom apartment facing the river. I sat in the sun, looking at the river with the sun all over my body. It looks serious, but in fact I can't see anything, because the focus of my mind is not on my eyes but on my memories. The memories make me look as if I have just taken drugs and am reminiscing about the wonderful addiction to drugs. I can't guarantee that all people who live in memories are addicts, but I think most of them are, at least I am.

What was I thinking when I was in a trance like I had just finished taking drugs? I said that I was thinking about the first two days, two months, two years, and you have no reason not to believe it. But I don't want to lie to you, I'm reminiscing about my childhood in the wet rain in Jiangnan. Although it was a wet and musty childhood, why should I lie to you?

Whether my childhood was good or not, happy or not, how many shocking periods, exclamation marks, and question marks were left behind, although they were related to me, they were not right or wrong, and they were only accessories of my childhood. But after all, memories are not tangible hands, nor are they tangible objects, nor are they as simple as holding a book in your hand and holding a cup. Often the untouched ones come suddenly, and expand, occupy the main position, and the real theme disappears.

But I'm okay, the content of my memories is scattered, and it's hard for me to discern the main idea, even if there is no other thing in the memory to interfere with, so I can dispel the idea of being upset and irritable because of the disturbance of my memory.

The question of how long the memories last, is the equivalent of asking how long a dream has been going on, and it is a difficult question to answer. I only know that the rainy weather lasts longer, and the memories last longer, which is a fit, because the Jiangnan of my wet childhood is always in the fog and rain, and the memories are easier to linger in my mind in the same environment.

What do I often recall? My school is next to a small river that is clear all year round, and there are a row of poplars on the bank, and the poplars come and go with a few water cedars, and those metasequoia trees grow to the sky, telling everyone that this school has a long history. There are not only fish in that river, but also lobsters are abundant, and every lobster season, a row of male students by the river are fishing for lobsters.

Lobsters eat too much and eat too little, it's hard to imagine, just tie a few willow leaves with a rope, and you can catch a handful of crayfish the size of half a finger in one class. Those lobsters serve only one purpose, to make them race on an open field. The class bell rang, everyone rushed to the classroom, and under the call of the bell, our group of bear children had no pity for the little life, and raised the crayfish to the playground. By the next recess, they were all dried corpses.

In order to save space, the school's sports facilities, such as single and parallel bars, are all pressed against the trees, and you can climb up to the branches and leaves of the metasequoia tree, which is straight and towering, and the condescending view is impressive.

It is necessary to talk about our teachers. At that time, the main subjects of primary school were only Chinese and mathematics, and those two teachers from grades 1 to 6 had the longest contact with me, but it is difficult to recall their faces now. At that time, we had an art teacher who could paint oil paintings, and later I heard that many elementary school art teachers were beautiful women, but the art teacher at our stall was five big and three thick, with a palm-sized Mediterranean Sea on his head, wearing glasses in class, and talking as if he might lose his breath in the next few seconds. I just forgot the appearance of all the teachers, and I still remember his surname Shi, a single name and a new name. The voice of resentment shouted to Shi Xin and still echoes in my head to this day.

The road home from school is divided into two sections, the first section is paved with fine stones, and it is the road. At that time, the roads were not as open to cars as they are now. In the past, there were very few cars on the country roads, and tractors were relatively common means of transportation, but in fact, tractors were rare, and there were bicycles, the kind of old-fashioned bicycles that always whistled past me with the sound of bells. Now we know that bikes are slow, but they do feel like they're whistling when they pass by.

On both sides of the road are some inconspicuous town buildings, there is no way to describe "inconspicuous", only to say that the objective phenomenon, the two-story small building is already conspicuous, and the degree of "inconspicuous" can be imagined.

The houses on both sides of the road were just a row along the road, and there was no such thing as a community in the town at that time, and the town was actually a country. After turning a corner and changing the angle, I saw that the town was surrounded by vast rice fields. I have never seen a rice field like that since I left Gangnam, and it has left me with an astonishing memory of beauty since I was a child. That memory hasn't changed now, and I don't think it ever will.

What are the rice paddies like? No matter how I remember it, I can't remember it clearly, but I remember that it was golden on a sunny day, and on a rainy day, the color also sank, between green and black. At that time, it was just such a feeling of color, and the word magic was not popular at that time, and the magic of the rice fields was a metaphor that came up later.

There is no over-passage between the road and the village, and entering the village is the village road. Since it rains all year round in the place where I live, the mud road is repeatedly soaked in water, and the soak is not sticky and loose, like a woman's belly. The difference is that the woman's belly is snow-white, and the village road is black and oily.

The place where I live can be called a local landmark in terms of the scale of the building. A rare three-story building, with a single floor facing south, five rooms in the east and west, and a row of walls on the south side, with the gate on the west side of the wall. Originally a cotton mill, this building was built at the height of its career, with a mix of factory and dormitory. After that, due to poor management, the company filed for bankruptcy, leaving only these houses. Catching up with the migrant workers flocking to the affluent land in Jiangnan, the boss turned into a landlord. As long as those houses do not collapse in natural disasters**, and only rely on collecting rent, they will have no worries about eating and drinking for the rest of their lives.

It is said that in the early days, there were only rice paddies around the factory yard, and there were no people. Workers in cotton mills want to go to work conveniently, and those who have plans to renovate their houses apply for homestead to build houses near the factory. Although it has not formed a large-scale architectural complex, it has a certain climate. Walk through the gates of those buildings into the courtyard. These are the whole routes I took home.

This is the Jiangnan environment in my childhood impression. Memories are lost and misplaced, and mistakes will inevitably occur, but I can only say that in general, the Jiangnan environment in which I live is roughly like this.

Corresponding to the overall environment of the whole Jiangnan, my memory is rough and not detailed; For the big yard that really carries my life, the deviation of memory is relatively small.

Whenever I entered the compound after school, the smoke and rain became deeper and deeper due to the arrival of evening, and the passages leading to the main entrances of the building were paved with blue bricks. The paving of the road with bricks is not long, after wells, pools, gutters, etc., and for these facilities, which have actually become obstacles, the road can only be detoured. Standing at the gate of the courtyard, the blue brick road is like a crack in porcelain, spreading irregularly in an irregular direction.

Our family's rental house is on the third floor of the south-facing house. My father said that there were many benefits to living on the top floor. The first is cleanliness, and in the rented house where they used to live, the chaotic, hurried footsteps upstairs that somehow but always justified could be heard. You don't have to worry about getting messed up by the dripping water upstairs when you dry your clothes and quilts. Of course, the biggest advantage is that the rent is cheaper, which is said to be one-third cheaper than the first floor, and only half of it is paid compared to the second floor.

I don't feel these benefits intuitively, but I have a deep understanding of the disadvantages. Every rainy day, pray for a light rain in the sky and peace in our home. If it's raining heavily, then eating, doing homework, and sleeping are all in the drizzle that is unique to the room.

It's romantic to do something else in the rain, such as walking hand in hand with a girl you like. But eating, doing homework, and sleeping in the rain are definitely uncomfortable that cannot be described in words. In particular, I drooled over a piece of braised pork, and suddenly a drop of cobwebbed water fell into the bowl, which was enough to make me lose my appetite.

There was another thing, even more terrible than the rain, that I couldn't talk about, and I couldn't even explain why it was terrible. Do I have to tell people that it's terrible because there are few occupants on the third floor, do I tell them that they once saw a cat crouching in front of an empty house, squinting at me, and that the door was open for at least half a year?

The evening came early, and the wind was whistling, blowing the rain slanting. On that day, the eyes that could have seen the 500-metre vista at the same time could only reach the edge of the wall. I saw the cat, and it looked at me with hostility, and its meow turned into human language, the word "go away."

Behind it, a very old and dilapidated looking door was ajar, and the wind blew on it, making it sway, as if someone was pushing it behind the door, and gently, open, close, open, close, I was so frightened that I was not able to express my panic.

I ran, my footsteps echoing in the rainy days of the haze in the south of the Yangtze River. My fears are real and they hold a lot of weight in my heart, but what am I going to say to them? Shall I say, for the cats, for the ajar door, for the small number of residents on the third floor?

I'm not stupid enough to call me a mouse-like mockery.