The Sea, Endless Drifting
Author: Zhu Anfeng. Originally published on QQ Zone on May 19, 2008.
Recently I have been very busy, busy on a business trip in a small seaside city.
At some point, friends began telling me that I was the kind of person who would always live like a free spirit, drifting for a lifetime.
Perhaps the drifting truly began when I left home to study in Beijing.
Perhaps drifting, too,
is a kind of life.
I like traveling, though there are many kinds of travel. One kind has no clear destination at all: you simply want to go far away to a strange place, trying to escape your own heart. Another is like flying a kite: no matter how far you go, because of that fine thread of attachment, you still return to the place you know. Another drifts with the wind, stopping when the wind stops, and setting off again when the wind rises. Another is like a dandelion seed, floating and floating until it lands somewhere and grows roots there.
I do not know which kind I belong to. Perhaps I am the one that drifts with the wind. When the wind stops, I fall, rest, and remain still. When the wind rises, I lift again and travel far away. Like a kite with a broken string, I go wherever the wind carries me, to places I do not know. Until one day the kite is torn apart and is no longer a kite at all, only broken scraps of paper covered in dust. Then everything will be over.
I have passed through many places and lived through many stories. Yet I am never the central figure in those stories. It is like every time I go to Shanghai and choose a Starbucks, order a latte, and sit quietly by myself. There is nowhere that can really keep me, and no one who will ask me to stay. In truth, I really do wish there were a pair of faithful eyes to cry with me, someone who would tell me not to leave, someone who would wait for me every night. But if drifting is truly my fate, then all I can do is let the wind carry me wherever it wishes.
I vaguely remember 2003, one month before SARS, when I went to Hefei to look for work. It was still cold there in April, with drizzle in the sky. In a small shabby restaurant by the roadside, I ordered braised chicken and a little Erguotou. I drank while watching the other diners and tasting my own mood. What I remember now is that the warmth and coldness of human life were contained in that single cold cup of liquor, while the world I imagined then still had no edges.
I only hope that somewhere there is a place with beautiful sunsets and quiet night skies, and a pair of loyal ears willing to listen to the stories of my travels, the people in those stories, and the feelings of those lives. I hope there are also faithful eyes that would cry with me for the beautiful and sorrowful love within those stories.
A person drifts far away. Where, then, is the heart?