1、

I occasionally think back to the past.

If I put the time in my elementary school years, it would often be a sunny day during the summer vacation, I would lie on the bed with a mat on the second floor of the rental house, facing the big rusty window, the sky with clouds floating outside the window, and the white clouds in the summer, I would look up at the clouds one by one, imagine that they were changing creatures, what kind of story they were playing, and then I would slowly fall asleep in this imagination.

Outside the window there was a large tree, which used to have a wall, and on the other side of the wall was a pig farm and its huge septic tank, which occasionally wafted with a foul smell in the summer. But in the memories there is no smell, only the feeling of the wind blowing into the house.

Memories will be cooled by this wind, and I lay in bed and read the books I borrowed from my friends one by one: I finished reading Sanmao, I finished reading "The Adventures of Hal Roger", I finished reading "Home", "Spring", "Autumn", I finished reading Gorky's "Childhood......

Junior high school is often a summer afternoon when school is going to work. If the memories of elementary school are accompanied by the blue of the sky and wind, junior high school always turns into the golden yellow of sunlight and dirt paths, I live in my grandparents' house, the four walls of cement, the ceiling is turned by a fan, the living room has a standing cabinet, a corner cabinet, a table and chairs, a sofa, a coffee table, a TV, one side of the wall is pasted with a map of China and a map of the world, and into the next room, there is a wall cabinet for a kettle, a cold water kettle, a photo frame and various small objects......

The time was 1:45, and after lunch, the voice of CCTV5's program "From the Beginning - Chinese Football Over the Years" came from the TV. For a while, I was obsessed with listening to the ending song of this show and then going to school, and I still remember the lyrics of that song: I have met for many years, and I have been with each other for many years, day by day, I met yesterday and tomorrow, year after year, you will always be the face of my gaze, and my world will keep spring for you......

Looking back carefully, it seems that it was the World Cup in '98, my enthusiasm for football was only at that time, maybe I liked this song more, but I might have to be late after listening to the song, grandpa was taking a nap, grandma came out of the room and asked me why I didn't go to school yet, I put down the last few lines of this song and rushed out of the room, running wildly on the road to school at noon.

My grandfather has long since passed away, and I remember my grandmother twenty years ago. My grandmother is now 86 years old, and yesterday morning, she walked two miles with a bag of things and came to see me, saying, "Tomorrow is your birthday, your parents told me not to quarrel with you, I will bring you some eggs." "There was a bag of walnut powder in the bag, two boxes of eggs bought in the supermarket, and a pig's belly.

Grandma's body is still healthy, but she suffers from brain atrophy and has to take medicine all the time, and she has been very lonely since my grandfather passed away, sometimes worrying about my lack of money, and then worrying about my brother's job and future, she often wants to go back to where she used to live, but there are no friends and relatives there, and after the age of eighty, it is difficult to make long-distance trips.

I've had many years without a birthday, and if possible, the gift I would most like to get on my birthday day is a good night's sleep.

But I can't sleep.

2、

What is the picture of high school?

High school was noon and afternoon on a cloudy day, and I came out of school with a rented bookstore on one side and an Internet café on the other. There was a lot of people coming out of the school gate, I counted the little money in my pocket, went to eat a little bit, and then rented books to read, and I read all the books in the four or five bookstores near the school, and then I learned to read books online.

At that time, my grandfather died, my brother's condition was good and bad, the family sold everything that could be sold, and I was often hungry, and I occasionally looked back at the few photos I left in high school, and the photos were all with a rebellious and cold face, and I didn't like these photos because I couldn't actually afford to get them.

After high school, I stopped studying and worked part-time for two to three years, but it was always very short in my memory. I can remember on the highway on the outskirts of Foshan, with a ceramic factory on one side and a small village on the other, and in the early morning when the gray night sky was dotted with stars, I walked out of my rental house and went to a small Internet café with only four computers to start writing down the plot I had in mind when I worked.

That's Survival Diary.

After more than ten years, it was a long writing in a closed room, during which I experienced some things, made some friends, saw some places, and did not have a solid memory, and in the blink of an eye, it was now.

Now I'm thirty-four, which is a strange age.

Thirty-four years old, thirty-three, and thirty-two...... The numbers are clear, and before that, I always felt that I was a young man who had just left my twenties, but when I realized the number thirty-four, I always felt that the twenties had passed away as my subject.

It's like becoming middle-aged in the blink of an eye.

3、

Looking back on the past year, many things actually didn't make much waves in my heart, and many things didn't seem to me worth remembering, but compared to my entire twenties, the past year, maybe I went out the most: I participated in some events, joined several associations, won two awards, and even sold the rights to my son-in-law...... But in fact, I can't remember how I felt at the time, maybe I was happy at the time, but now I think about it, except for tiredness, many times I am empty.

I had a wedding with my wife in May last year, and the wedding was a make-up event, which I thought was just a formality, but the night before the wedding, I still prepared a proposal in earnest—I don't know how enthusiastic other wedding proposals are—I said in my proposal: "...... Life is very difficult, but if two people work together, maybe one day, we can come to terms with it. ”

I wanted to say at first, "One day we're going to beat it." "But the truth is that we can't defeat it, and perhaps the best outcome is to get understanding, and not to hate each other. That's when I realized that I had been hating my life for a long time, trying to defeat it.

How did I become my thirty-four-year-old self? I couldn't capture the exact process, but I could only see all sorts of features: I had fatty liver, gallstones, which I suddenly discovered when I went to the hospital for a check-up two years earlier. I lost quite a bit of my hair – the result of my constant suffering at the age of twenty-five, which I have mentioned in a previous article, and I will not repeat it here.

I wanted to sleep when I talked about my birthday, but it wasn't hypocrisy, I hadn't had a good night's sleep in years. Looking back, in the first half of my twenties, I used to write day and night, day and night, and sometimes I was very tired of writing, so I would sleep with my head covered, and I would sleep for 14 hours or even 18 hours, and when I woke up, I would take a shower, and then I would come back to this world in good spirits.

I don't know how long it has been since I've experienced what dreamless sleep feels like. In the case of extreme use of the brain, I experienced the most superficial sleep every day, and all kinds of dreams would go on forever, writing at twelve o'clock, closing my eyes at three o'clock in the morning, and waking up unconsciously at eight o'clock in the morning.

When I was very young, I longed for the goddess of literature to one day favor me, my brain was very good, but I never wrote well, so I had to keep thinking about it, one day I finally found a way to enter another world, I concentrated my best energy to see it, and now, I already know how to see these things more clearly, but at the same time, it is like the golden hoop that Guanyin Niangniang put on the Supreme Treasure......

We always have to pay more for what we want to get.

4、

The day I realized that I was 34 years old was one night in April this year, when I said that I was going to challenge the 20th watch, and one night I wrote half a chapter, and I thought I could finish it the next day, so I sent a single chapter preview, and the next day it was overturned, and I sent another single chapter, saying that it would be postponed for a day.

I tossed and turned that night and couldn't sleep – because I broke my promise.

Over the years of writing, many people have said that the psychological quality of bananas is so good that they can never take readers seriously. In fact, as far as I am concerned, I also want to be a sincere, trustworthy and even popular long-sleeved dancer, but in fact, that just can't be done, the book is the most important, the reader is second, and then maybe me, before writing, my integrity, my image is actually insignificant.

But what should be felt is actually not missing at all.

I sent a single chapter on the empty window at twelve o'clock, and tossed and turned in bed until four o'clock in the morning, and my wife estimated that I was choking enough, so I simply walked to the study next door with the bed quilt and lay on the sofa chair for reading, but I still couldn't sleep.

I looked at the city at night through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the street lights were all on, and downstairs was a construction site, with huge incandescent lamps shining brightly at the sky. But there was no one in all sights, everyone was already asleep.

At this time, it was already difficult for me to stay up late, which would make me unable to refresh for the whole day, but why couldn't I sleep? I thought of myself who could sleep for 18 hours before, and I thought all the way forward, high school, junior high school, elementary school......

I suddenly remembered a brain teaser I watched when I was a child, and the question was like this: "How far can a person go when he walks into the forest?" ”

The answer is: half of the forest.

……

How long ago was that? Probably more than twenty years ago. The first time I participated in the spring outing held by my class, on a cloudy day, my classmates took a bus from school to the suburbs, and my good friend at that time brought a ham sausage and gave me half of it, which was the first time in my life that I ate such a delicious food. During the spring outing, as a member of the study committee, I threw the slips of paper that I had prepared and copied various questions into the grass, and the students picked up the questions and answered them correctly to get various small prizes.

I copied those questions from my brain teaser book at home, and I have forgotten all the other questions now, except for that one, which I have always remembered clearly over the years.

"What is the maximum distance a person can go into the forest?

Half of the forest.

Why: Because the remaining half, you're out of the forest. ”

Ever since I was a child, I have felt that this question is the author's cleverness, and it is not valid at all, it is just a superficial rhetoric, and perhaps because of this, I have always been entangled in this question and this answer. But on the night I approached the age of thirty-four, irritable and insomnia, this question suddenly popped into my head, as if it was desperately beating me to make me understand it.

- because the remaining half, you're walking out of the forest.

……

I felt like I had been hit with a hammer, and I didn't know when, I went back to bed, and then slowly fell asleep.

5、

I've written about the weight of time over and over again in my books, but it was probably that night a month ago that I really understood that weight deeply.

I suddenly realized how many things I had lost, how many possibilities, and in the process of immersing myself in writing, I suddenly became a middle-aged man of thirty-four. After all, there is no way to pursue this process.

I can't dwell on these things yet, and in the month that followed, I thought, if everybody was going to inevitably go out of the forest, it might not be something negative, but it would make so much sense to the images in my mind, so meaningful to what I saw in front of me.

It's just sad.

I haven't come to terms with the world yet, and it will be a very complicated job.

A few days later, in an online interview, the reporter asked: What is the most painful thing I encountered in writing?

I replied: every day is painful, every day there are problems that need to be repaired, it is easy to solve the problems, but new problems are bound to emerge one after another. I fantasized that one day I would be able to write a perfect essay with ease, but in the past few years I have realized that it is impossible, and I can only accept this pain and then seek satisfaction in the process of slowly resolving it.

I think I'm going to enjoy this pain until I'm fifty years old—I've said many times before that I'm going to write until fifty, and I didn't expect that this age would be so close. It's only been 16 years, and maybe in the moment of lying in ambush, everything is gone in an instant.

Cherish the present, ladies and gentlemen—if I had been able to sleep eighteen hours at one time, I would not have understood what would have troubled him later, just as we who walked into the forest would not have understood the preciousness of the journey beneath our feet.

6、

In the second half of last year, I went to Hangzhou.

On the high-speed train back from Hangzhou, there was an old couple sitting in the front row, they lowered the back of their chairs and lay there, the old woman kept leaning her upper body on her husband's chest, and the husband put his arm around her, and the two pointed at the scenery outside the window.

I watched it interesting and left a photo.

My wife sat next to me, and she had been recuperating for half a year, and her weight once reached 43 kilograms. She told me that she had a small dog, and she decided to buy it, and I said okay, you can get ready to raise it.

Soon after, we got a border herd, one of the smartest and most exercise-hungry dogs, who tossed the family to a head.

Before the end of last year, when I cut the computer cable tie, I stabbed myself in the hand, and it took half a month to get better.

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, Bian Mu Xiong jumped out of the back seat window of the car, his hind leg was brought, and he broke his bones, and then he almost tossed for nearly two months, and his leg injury was just right, and he suffered from coronavirus, coccidiosis and other diseases, of course, these have passed.

The renovation began in March, and in April, my wife opened a small flower shop, and I went to wrap flowers every day, and I occasionally went to sit and sit.

After the dog recovered, I began to take it out every day, my belly has been smaller, compared to the fattest time, now it is much better, but there is still a double chin, a few days earlier by the wife said.

April passed, May came again, the weather was getting better, I couldn't drive, and my wife used the golf at home. She went to pack flowers every day and came back in the evening, occasionally very tired, I rode an electric motorcycle, she sat in the back seat, and we started driving along the streets of Wangcheng again at night.

When we first started with electric cars, we rode them around the streets of Wangcheng every day, and we had already been to many places, but this year, several new roads were opened.

What we are familiar with is gradually changing.

I used to talk about the park with the lake villas, where the vegetation grew deeper, and sometimes when we walked past it, the trees were deep and the leaves were all over the ground, as if we were walking in an old woods, and when it was too late, we didn't go in.

We found a few new parks or wilderness, often unoccupied, and occasionally we brought our dogs, a little closer to the newly renovated government park, a little farther away to the river in Wangcheng, a large area of wilderness near the huge locks next to the dam, and a trail that had been built for many years but was not frequented. Next to the trail, there are deserted wooden shelves large enough for weddings, and on the side of the wooden shelves, dense wisteria flowers hang down from the trunks of the trees, which is particularly quiet in the twilight.

A school in Wangcheng has built a new campus, and from a distance, the rows of teaching buildings and dormitories look like gorgeous castles in the Russian style, and my wife and I occasionally take an electric car to walk around, and we can't help but sigh that if we go to school here, we must be able to have a good relationship.

The commercial street next to the old school was demolished, and Peng's lo-mei, which my wife used to like to patronize, was no longer nowhere to be found. More new shops and restaurants have opened on the streets of Wangcheng, and as far as the eye can see, they are all bright and brightly lit.

The world may continue to evolve and innovate like this.

The dog is seven months old and has become more energetic and obedient every day.

I listen to music every day and go out to walk the dog, and the first music I click on is often Xiao Ke's "Gently Down", one of my favorite lyrics is like this:

——In the face of the endless years, who can do anything.