On September 12, 2019, accompanied by my parents, I left the small mountain town where I had lived for 19 years and took the high-speed train to Chengdu. And the distance between me and my hometown, as the scenery outside the window gradually changed from plains to mountains, and from mountains to plains, passing through tunnels and crossing bridges. From Hanzhong to Guangyuan, and then to Mianyang and Chengdu, the distance between time and space has become more and more profound in the transformation of platforms and platforms. At that moment, a sentence suddenly appeared in my mind - hometown, far away.

When I first arrived in Chengdu, it rained for several days in a row, and the temperature dropped sharply, and it seemed that I had transitioned from midsummer to late autumn, which made me, who was still planning to spend another month or two in Chengdu, feel the chill of autumn here in advance. The few short-sleeved shirts I had brought with me from home were no longer enough to keep me warm, and I was too shy to spare any money to buy autumn clothes. So, at the entrance of the cafeteria, between the teaching buildings, and beside Ginkgo Avenue, if anyone pays attention, they will find a shabby-dressed, hurried figure, who often holds a book borrowed from the library in his hand, and always wears a black and white checkered shirt with tiny fur balls. It's just that people are used to paying attention to those glamorous and beautiful talents, and no one will pay attention to the lonely figure of a poor sour boy. But it allows me to stay away from the crowd, not to be confined to human feelings, to hike alone in the dark, and to think about the meaning of life by the way, even now I can't tell whether life comes from nothing or from nothing.

On National Day, I didn't go home, and there was no other reason, just because I was reluctant to pay more than 700 yuan for the fare back and forth. The only trip out of the middle is to go to Bazhong to find a long-distance girlfriend who is still in high school and has not seen each other for half a year, we are holding a small umbrella in the heavy rain, snuggling up to each other, like a lonely island floating in the sea, it seems that everything has some hazy beauty, but I didn't think that meeting became the last meeting with each other. We broke up shortly after we came back, and I brought it up at the time, and she didn't ask me why. Every day after that, whenever I think about the process of the breakup that day, I feel heartache because we seem to even break up as before, tacitly knowing each other.

Because of different life trajectories, we haven't messaged each other for several weeks before we broke up, and even if we suddenly have time to play with our phones, we will think that she (he) must still be busy and can't see it, so I dismiss the idea of texting each other. Until the day of the breakup, I lay in bed and edited a message for her on WeChat: "I feel a little tired. ”

She immediately replied to me, "Can't you hold on?"

Me: "Hmm. ”

Her: "Okay, then...... Shall we leave it at that?"

Me: "Okay. ”

Really, when I say the word "good", my heart is relaxed for a moment. But the moment I ended chatting with her and turned off my phone, my tears suddenly gushed out, from the quiet flow at the beginning to the wailing and crying later, and my mind just kept repeating the phrase "no ...... home"

In mid-October, my parents called me from home. My mother told me that it was raining in my hometown these days, and it was already a bit autumn, and asked me if the weather in Chengdu was good, and if you would like to send me two sweaters and a quilt; my father told me that they were busy picking chestnuts in the mountains these days, and the walnuts at home should also be hunted on the trees, and asked me if I would like to send me some walnuts and chestnuts. I listened patiently and told them not to worry too much about me and to pay attention to their bodies before doing anything.

A few days later, I received a heavy package containing a bag of mountain goods, two coats and a futon sent from my hometown. When I gave walnuts and chestnuts to my roommates, they were obviously not interested, and indeed, compared to the duck necks and rabbit heads they brought from home, I was a little simple and shabby. So, I had to put a few walnuts in my pocket before each class, and use the class time to secretly crack them, and taste the bitterness and sweetness with the taste of hometown alone.

In the nineteen years before my life, I had never really left home, and I had always lived in a radius of 100 miles from home, and perhaps it was because I never left that I didn't pay attention to it. Until one day, when I left the place and saw different scenery and experienced different stories, all of a sudden, my life began to become detailed and vivid, and those things and emotions that I had never cared about in my past life were magnified in an instant, becoming clear, sincere, and indescribable, but I could not forget.

I have also come to understand that the so-called hometown is never a fixed place or area, but an emotion and memory. So, no matter which direction you are heading, as long as you take that step, your hometown will always be behind you. She is watching your back from a short distance, you can see her, but you can never get close. Then, she will smile at you, beckon, and say softly, "Don't be afraid, child, just go ahead." ”

It is said that after death, the soul travels to the far north, sinks into the abyss, and wanders alone in the crevices, like a piece of ice floes floating on the surface of the sea.

Until the next Aurora Night, every wandering soul will embark on their return journey under the guidance of the North Star......

I used to think about a question that people are used to divide into poor and rich people in society, but what kind of door is a door that is colder than a cold door? But I think if there really is that division, I must be a level lower than Hanmen. Don't worry, let me tell you a story:

There is a child who lives in a poor mountain village, and his family is the poorest family in the village. When he was in the first and second years of junior high school, his living expenses were only 50 yuan a week. And, perhaps it was destined by God that his life would never be spent on a relatively smooth road. Just last March, because of a cold, he went to the hospital for a check-up, but accidentally discovered other diseases - congenital heart disease, atrial septal defect. We all know that the human heart has two atria and two ventricles, and atrial septal defect means that there is a congenital gap in the membrane between the two atria that needs to be surgically closed.

No, if that's it, it only means that he is a poor person, but there is never a shortage of poor people in this world, and even worse than him, and there are many poor people. So next, let's listen to another version of this story together.

There was a boy who started working part-time when he was a freshman in junior high school. The day after graduating from junior high school, he took a hundred yuan from home and went to the city to work for the summer vacation alone. When he was about to return home from school, he used the money he earned to buy a mobile phone and pay for his tuition. After going to college, he didn't feel that he could finally relax like other classmates, but used his little living expenses to join Yilang, to learn to host and speak, and shuttle back and forth between school and Yilang every day, busy, it seems that just like high school, the freshman year has become what the junior and senior years should be.

Then, one day, he himself went to officiate at the wedding, went to a large warm-up, and participated in a speech contest, standing on the sacred stage today!

That's right, this person is me, an ordinary plant and tree, but it is born to the sun. A friend once asked me: Baoping, you are working so hard at this age, don't you feel bitter, don't you feel tired? My answer is: It's okay, I'm just afraid that I'm mediocre, I'm afraid that I'm timid, I'm afraid that I'm going to die in the same place before I set off!

I've always felt that life is never an easy road, and there is no real equality of all beings, and you can't decide what you are born against, what you look like, and what you are gifted with. However, I think one thing is fair to each of us, and that is that the process of life is from birth to death, from the beginning to the end, and we should not be presumptuous or deceive ourselves. The length of life is never about how long you can live, but about how many things you have done in your short life and how many traces you have left in the world.

So, friends, today, have you worked hard for your dreams?