I was born in the fifth month of the lunar calendar, the traditional month of poison. It is said that my parents were not excited, especially my father, who had to get married. When I was a child, I lived outside the home for longer than at home, like a guerrilla fight, and every few weeks I moved to a home—all of my parents' friends' homes. They divorced before I can remember, and they call their uncles and aunts more often than mom and dad every day. The longest stayed at an aunt's house for two months. My aunt is a teacher, and I have an older brother who goes to school at home. One night, my brother took me to watch a cartoon. At half past eight, my aunt came home and found us playing, and kicked my brother like kicking a leather ball, and he rolled a few meters away. I cried with fright. The aunt said that she was not allowed to cry. So he did not weep, but shed tears. The next day, when my aunt brought milk, I asked if there was anything I wanted to eat, candy or snack. I said small cakes. My aunt took us to eat, but I remember not wanting to eat at all. The milk that day was thick and mellow and tasted like lime slurry. The cake is mashed bricks. After leaving my aunt's house, I never saw them again. I wonder if the little brother will be kicked again for watching cartoons.

My dad later found a couple of new aunts. Most recently, just last week, I was woken up by my aunt and went to the mahjong parlor to find him, it's past two o'clock. I was stunned, because everyone was playing mahjong and tucked it away, but my dad put all the cards down and lined them up neatly on the table, as if the game had started with a hush, and the moth hit the flickering light bulb to cheer him on. Every move is understood by the players, and it is naturally impossible to win. He loses money, loses in a sloppy manner, does not owe at all, and is as happy as a crisp collision in the shuffle. One loss is hundreds, and one night is thousands. The court awarded me to my mother, but my father occasionally took me to live for a while, to give me something to eat, and a little fatherly love. I can't give more, I always lose money, and I can only transfer my living expenses to the minimum amount ruled by the court every month. I heard that my father's friend said that once they broke up, Dad always went out of the house and generously gave the house to the aunt who was a stranger. I don't know if it's true or not, but my parents have been arguing for a long time over the division of property in the divorce.

Mom never got married again, and maybe never will. Her love stayed after she met her dad and before she conceived me, it should have been a few months, or years. Since then, her life has been insulated from her youth. She became a single mother and single-handedly supported my life. Even though the days are crossed between two cottages, utility bills and gas bills, she still leaves tenderness to her daughter in the photo.

But that's not the case. My days with my mom were long shriveled and gloomy. She paints on the rain-soaked walls, painstakingly applying bright colors, and eventually turns into a messy mess of cloudiness. Every time I took a bowl of milk, every time I lit a firework, the warmth was still in my throat, and the brilliant fire had not cooled down in the air and turned to ashes, my mother would tell me that my father would not give you this. There may have been an afternoon when I sat alone on my couch at home munching on a cookie. For a child, it's big, big enough to chew until the next century. As I swallowed, I suddenly noticed a fluffy bug crawling on the other side of the biscuit, with its green head spinning, as if wondering if there was a creature doing the same thing. I threw the biscuits away, not crying or screaming. Later I realized that this is life with my mother. If I don't eat cookies, I'll starve to death. After eating it, I found that the biscuit was crawled by insects. By the time I realized it, I had been chewing for years. I only knew that my mother was good to me, but I didn't know that there were countless kinds of good in the world, and I didn't know what kind of good I wanted. I didn't learn how to love her. Dad didn't teach, and neither did Mom. Conceived and born at the wrong time, I was the beginning and continuation of their struggle.

I had a dream. In the dream, my mother went out and didn't come back for a few days. I begged an aunt to call her. The person on the other end of the line had a good time and laughed, she had never laughed like that in her life. But she ignored me. When I was dying of starvation, my father took people around looking for me. In fact, I have been waiting for them to love me and teach me how to love people. Perhaps. I waited a long time and no one came.

Elementary school is very sunny, and I always want everyone to feel that children who grow up in single-parent families can also be very happy. Yes, there are quite a few healthy kids like this, but I'm not (okay, I see, you know you have a friend that's like that). I can't help but think of them as ordinary parents, and I can't help but want a little love that other children can easily reach out to. I used to think that my dad was optimistic and my mom was strong, and I wanted to learn from them. Not so. One is blind, the other is paranoid. I want to say to myself every time that when I grow up, I will have the ability to build my own world, where there are stable relationships, genuine emotions, everyone who cares for each other, and is truly like family. But I don't have the ability to support myself yet, and I can't not love them and not expect them. I always subconsciously stood there and waited, quiet and well-behaved, thinking that I was a daughter who would be truly pampered by them. Waiting for them to love me, waiting for them to fulfill my desire to be loved. Again and again, I don't know how many times, I wanted to wait like this, for the kind of love that I thought I had, that was natural, that would come someday. It hasn't come yet. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never in the first life.

I thought about whether they wouldn't have had to get married and would be better off without me. (Well, I see, it turns out that there are people you know who think so.) Yes, like you said, you can't decide whether you are born or not. Moreover, when we thought about this, we suddenly realized that we had all been born for so long, more than ten years, and there was no way to go back to the past where we didn't understand anything. Everyone has nothing but the front. We have to live.

So, I think, I was right in my decision. In addition to waiting, I want to grow up, to live independently on my own, to find a way of life that belongs to me, a new way of life. It is not this kind of waiting, waiting in place with ethereal hope. This stagnation is no different from death, it only takes all meaning out of my life, even if I am alive. We can't choose whether to be born or not, but we always have to choose how we want to live. Maybe fate destroys a person easily, and it is destroyed in the blink of an eye with a raised hand. However, people should not give up the opportunity to choose their own life, and they should not leave the right to live, love, and die to fate.

So you understand why I was so angry with you just now, right? I understand your hesitation and hesitation, and even appreciate the attitude: you are being responsible for others. But you also have to take responsibility for your own life. It's not just about living, it's not just about not hurting others, it's about finding the meaning of your own life, not just standing still and looking at others. You're alive. You have to act. You can't expect from others and have no demands on yourself. "Look at what you will do, think carefully; Don't always stare into the distance, don't always stare into the distance! [1] Faith will come from afar, wake up from your sleep, your blood is still circulating, and your life is far from exhausted. [2] Don't find everyone else and lose yourself.

Mei Mei looked at me with a smile.

In fact, you have a very stable and harmonious family. Your family will be the envy of many people, and relatives can tolerate and endure each other, even if they release their emotions to each other and cannot understand each other for a while, they will not hold grudges. For Mei Mei or Li Bin, this is a very luxurious thing. Can you imagine? Until three years ago, you lived in such an atmosphere. After that, your parents still want to restore that environment, but everyone knows that it is difficult to go back to the way it used to be, and they are just barely supporting each other. They can still hold on, they can maintain their role in the family, you can't hold on.

If it weren't for that, death would still be far from your life, and you probably wouldn't think about things that are too far away from your life, grow up ordinary, healthy, and then, like most people, go to college, plan your career, and start a family. You may be a qualified husband, or even a father, decent, gentle, steady, understanding, and will try to do even things you don't like. In your head, there is no other pattern than the family style that your parents taught you. Then you don't have to think about anything anymore, you can repeat your life for decades and be praised by others.

Everything is built on the foundation of the perfection of this family. Once it's not like that, you find that a lot of things aren't so solid.

You are lucky to have so many people around you who care about you and love you. You are also willing to care for others. But you have been in your own little world for a long time. Have you really thought about what kind of life you want? You're just waiting for yourself to grow from a little boy to an adult, thinking you'll have the answer, aren't you? Perhaps many people are like that.

But you should know that even when you grow up, you don't necessarily have a real answer. Perhaps you have accepted your destiny. It would be a bit cruel to be able to see the decades before you die. Although many people can't even imagine the future, they have to work hard for their daily lives. But if you realize that your life is going to be so shrunk and unchanging, don't you think about any change? Even if it is difficult for people to truly change themselves: living in the shadow of survival all their lives may not even be able to achieve self-awareness. But in these three years, you can feel that you are consciously wanting to discover yourself, you want to know what kind of person you are, you want to find your connection to the existence of your past life. In that case, why are you holding back?

Probably people have exhausted all their efforts, and what they have completed is only an ordinary life. But maybe on the day of death, when all the roles played by man are fading, there will be an opportunity to feel what makes us who we are, and that thing is what matters. Everyone will die, but not everyone can find the value of their own life, the most precious value for themselves and not others. You have the blood of others on your hands and your own sins, but that is not a reason for you to give up on improving yourself. You can calmly persuade others to live well and not to live up to life. What about yourself? You've also said that we're still young and that the possibilities are endless. Is this just for Li Bin? You want to get better, but you don't know what to do, you are afraid that your behavior will implicate others again, and you doubt whether you can really live like a normal person. It is easier for you to pay for your own blood than for others. But you know, if people exist, they will have an impact on the world all the time. This must be accepted and then held accountable for one's actions. Only when life has completely lost its meaning, people are not responsible, and life has withered at that time.

You should act, it's not an escape, it's not self-forgiveness. With an unforgettable past, people can still take steps forward, no matter how difficult it is. This is precious. The moment we move forward, life is running again, re-entering the endless flow of the world. Man has been destroyed again and again, but as long as he still puts his life on the track of moving forward, he has not been defeated. He threw a contemptuous and tired laugh at the disgusting things, visible and invisible, and booed: I am far away from you, and you cannot catch up with me.

The day you see your brother, make sure you can tell me that I have something else in my life besides the sins I have committed against you. Some things fall off like dreams, those joys and bitter tastes that are tasted and chewed over and over again. I put them aside now, along with the unrecognizable shells, they don't mean anything anymore, but I still have a little memory. It tells me that there has been a person like me and a person like you in the world. I didn't lose myself, and I didn't lose you who were with me in my life. Now that I'm here, it's not too early, but it's also keeping you waiting. I have always loved you and accepted all that you are about to do to me.

It's a long, long time before you see him, enough for you to find the meaning of your life and your way of living.

Thank you, Meimei. I've sorted out a lot of things.

You are welcome. Your car is coming, I see it. Actually, we have passed several cars before, and we talked for too long and missed it. However, you don't seem to be in a hurry, and it's fine. Going back to school? Is it to find someone, and there is someone waiting for you there?

Both. I was looking for someone, and someone was waiting for me. Bye. We'll see you next time.

We'll definitely see you again and you'll be happy. Goodbye and a speedy recovery.

Huddled in the back seat, I don't know how long later, I pulled out my phone. It was almost two o'clock, but I felt that time had passed longer than I had imagined.

There were three missed calls, all of which were made by Miller. There was also a bunch of WeChat messages asking me why I didn't answer the phone.

I decided not to go back to him now. I'll talk to him when I get to the dorm. It's just that there are so many things I want to say, I don't know where to start at a moment's notice. Fortunately, I still have time to think about it. Perhaps, the first thing we say when we see each other will be exactly the same - I'm back.

[1] Mei Mei's words are quoted from Feng Zhi's poem "Journey to the North 12 Memorial Service", and the following sentences are also used in this poem.