The next morning, people flocked to the city. I saw a few of his little haircuts in the crowd, and they also spotted me, came up to me, patted me on the shoulder, and said:

"Don't be too upset, boy."

I nodded and agreed, he was my dad, and it was impossible for me not to feel uncomfortable.

I watched as they took the incense one by one, lit it, bowed, and inserted it into the censer, and the people behind them continued to repeat.

People came and went without noticing me, and it was only my mom who stood by my side all the time.

At the memorial service, the Zhou family, who are related by blood, looked at each other coldly and stood in a row. I stood in it, but I saw her pear blossom with rain among his relatives and friends who had been with him for seven years, and his mother, who had been divorced for nine years, looked at me in the family seat with a worried face, and his hair was dejected.

I listened to the host's speech and thought it was ridiculous. What is ridiculous is not only his fluent Mandarin, but also this group of cold-eyed Zhou family members who are directly related by blood.

"Let's go!"

"Dad! Go all the way! ”

I raised the brazier with both hands that was burning paper money, and slammed it down. With this loud bang, the funeral was over. And the blood relationship between me and the Zhou family that is left of these people is also shattered with this brazier.

"Prepare the cover."

I watched him lie in the coffin I had carefully selected the day before, he was dressed in a proud suit from the time he had lived, and I saw that he seemed to be holding so many words in his mouth, and he had tried to squeeze my hand so hard that it was now resting peacefully on his lower abdomen.

The heavy cover plate fell, and others nailed a few long nails.

I'll never see him again.

A crane carried his coffin and slowly fell into the pit. Someone else untied the rope, and I was carefully observing where the coffin was placed. As soon as the soil is filled in and the red bricks are paved, we are people of two worlds.

The loess fell, and the sand and dust flew. Heavily covered his coffin, and severed the last connection between the world and him.

Go home.

When I opened the door, there were footprints all over the tile, I had never seen such a mess in my home. He is a serious cleanliness addict, and his home is clean all year round.

This is the person who goes to the empty building.

I suddenly went crazy and searched for something at home, looking for his used razor, used towel, clothes he wore the day before, and the watch he always wore on his hand.

I just wanted to find all the evidence that he ever existed.

There is a vigil at night, and the house is not as quiet as the day before. His hairboys drank at the table and talked about his deeds.

"From now on, it's just the three of us at the table."

I put three sticks of incense in the incense burner in front of his portrait and poured him a glass of wine and placed it next to the incense burner.

I walked over to them and pulled out a chair.

"Lao Zhou is not here, Xiao Zhou is still there."

They laughed, relieved.

"Lao Zhou, don't blame us for taking Xiao Zhou to drink, your son will take your place if you are not there."

After two glasses of wine, I lay back on the bed in my room. I opened my eyes to see the ceiling turning, and when I closed my eyes, I saw his face that seemed to be smiling. The night was quiet, only the sound of people chatting in the living room.

A stick of incense is nearly an hour, and I go to the living room every half hour to renew the incense.

There was a knock on the door early in the morning, and I sat up from my bed and shook my head to sober up, but I was still dizzy. The sun shone in through the window, and I closed the curtains. Hearing that his uncle had opened the door, he walked to his portrait and refilled three sticks of incense.

One by one, as the day before, people offered him incense. The door was open, and the wind blew me cold. I put on his coat and looked in the bathroom in the mirror as if I had aged a lot in the past six days. The dark circles under his eyes are so heavy, his face is scruffy, and his eyes are bloodshot.

I washed my face with water and looked at myself again, as if I saw him when I was young.

At the thank-you banquet, the Zhou family sat at one table, and my mother, my mother, and the three of him sat at a table. After listening to Zhou Yuansheng's sad speech, I had a hearty meal. Counting this day, it's the sixth day I haven't eaten.

"It's time for a good night's sleep."

When I got home, I walked into the room with a weak breath, locked the door, and collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep.

When I opened my eyes again, it was already the evening of the next day. I looked out the window at the gloomy sky, and my heart was complicated. But I stood quietly, for no one knew whether it was a tsunami or a tearful candle in my heart.

Later, I didn't act too sad. I've walked the way he's walked, I've blown the evening breeze he's blown through, I've been to the restaurant he's eaten with again, I've been to the barbershop he frequents.

"Some people aren't here, so people think he's gone,"

"But here he is."

I patted my chest. The person in front of me filled me with a glass of wine, and everyone held up their glasses.

"To you!"

As I sat on a chair by the pond and watched the leaves fall, I suddenly realized that my guilt for him was due to my resistance to him. It's not that I'm alienated from him, it's not that I'm rebellious, I just feel that I should have a centrifugal force with my original family and shouldn't be bound by it.

When I was a child, when I ate at home, he would ask me to hold the chopsticks lower, and he told me that if the chopsticks were high, I would be far away from home in the future. I nodded and slid down a bit, and he saw it and continued to eat with his head down. As for me, the hand holding the chopsticks went up a few more points.

But when everyone thought that he was the image of my strict father, he didn't even want me to use cheap headphones. How can this be a strict father, and how can we be a father and son who are not close to each other.

This is the last lesson my dad is giving me, it's called parting. It taught me that people are warm and cold, and it taught me that people are more sophisticated than every lesson I was sleepy at my desk. I remember that an old scholar once said in the book: If you want to become a talent, you must first become an adult.

In this tunnel of life, I patted the dirt on my body and stood up again, and continued to start looking for the exit step by step. Maybe a lot of walls, a lot of falls, but...

"Lao Zhou is not here, Xiao Zhou is still there."