Chapter 4 4

4 During their first tryst, Karina took the ring off her finger and threw it into the river. "When happiness comes," she said to Petkutan, "you have to add a little bit of bitterness to it, so you can remember it better. Because people remember unpleasant moments longer than pleasant ones... ..." The Serb Pavic tells the story in his book about the mysterious Khazar tribe. Like Karina, I tend to think that the people we love the most are the ones who give us the most pain.This is a rare natural endowment, a high-skill ability with a certain degree of relaxation, because too much sweetness makes people bored, too much pain makes people uninterested, and can keep us on this pain point that we can't stop , we will love him the longest.

Aimei said that this is the bad influence of Saturn on me - it is a Capricorn's eccentricity to think that love is a sad thing. I was born in winter with the Sun in Capricorn, ruled by Saturn.Saturn is the feminine, negative planet, ruling its kingdom with unshakable absolute will. "As ruthless as winter in the north." When we broke up, Xu Chen described me like this. Ruthless and ruthless, Capricorns have a bad reputation. Xu Chen was my lover in college, our story has nothing to say in terms of plot, it is the same as other youth stories, of course all such stories are the same - love and sweetness, hurt and pain , and break up.We had the purest and sweetest time, and then we hurt each other to the extreme, which left a deep impression on each other.I would venture to say that we come to a much greater understanding when we hurt each other than when we love each other.

Later, with the meticulous Capricornian attitude of rejecting excuses, I tried to recall the essential conflict between us.I have to say, it is indeed a conflict of nature, not a trivial matter. Let's give an example. There was a weekend when we were in love with each other. We agreed to meet at the gate of the Temple of Heaven. The appointment was made four days ago. At that time, telephones and pagers were not common. On that day, as the saying goes: there are unpredictable things in the sky.There was a strong wind outside, and the rain fell suddenly. I was lying in bed with a high fever, so I asked my classmate to call the concierge of his dormitory and leave a message saying that the appointment was cancelled.However, he went anyway.He was waiting in the rainstorm, hoping that I would go as promised. In the hazy rain and fog, he saw me shivering on the stone steps in front of the gate wrapped in a raincoat. The rain ran down my hair and covered my face. Come and hold me in his arms, I smiled at him, my hot body trembling under his fingers, and then passed out...

——The second half of the story did not happen, because I was lying in bed in the dormitory at that time.This scene was described by Xu Chen in his letter to me, and he told me that this is the lover of his dreams.I know that it would be more perfect if I could die in this story. He will love me all his life and write countless touching poems for me.He was greatly disappointed that I was lying under the covers when I was able to achieve such beauty. Xu Chen is an incurable dreamer.Far from being confused between a fictional life and reality, he insists without hesitation that reality is unreal and must be compromised by the life in his head.

You love someone, or you hate someone for the same thing. just like me. Speaking of it, being young is really helpless. When Xu Chen and I were completely inexperienced and incompetent, we came into contact with things we could not grasp and understand. The only thing that can help us is instinct.My instinct was to leave him. "The person I love deeply, you have to be strong, you have to endure the greatest suffering I can imagine, and you will die with me." ——Nineteen-year-old crazy Xu Chen. It was he who proposed the breakup and to his surprise I agreed.So he asked for reconciliation, I refused, asked again, refused again.On this point, I agree with him, I'm a ruthless person.In the next year, he tried various methods to make me turn back. He sat silently in front of me, lighting a cigarette in his hand.He said: "I didn't understand how people depend on a cigarette before, but now I understand—when a person feels lonely and in pain, the little fire on his finger is very warm."

He just kept the fire going, and he's still a smoker to this day. At that time, his painful and sad appearance was completely unattractive to me. I smelled some pretentiousness and artificiality in it, and realized that he was very fascinated by his painful appearance.I once tried to draw his attention to this, and awkwardly talked to him about the difference between innate poetry and acquired poetry. I said that acquired poetry is what human beings call: "Today's moon is so beautiful" and other secular and standardized poetry.Everyone can learn the day after tomorrow and work hard to show off.My words made him very angry, and he stammered and said to me: "Poetry, poetry is man-made! You wash a piece of clothing, it is just a piece of clothing, but if you think about it, this is what you love. If it is worn by a person with his sweat and smell on it, it is completely different. This is poetry.”

He had a grain of truth in what he said, but all my life I will loathe artificial pain, because we have always been chasing each other back and forth, bumping into each other in the intricate maze of life.Just as Sagan quoted Eluard's poem as the title of her novel: "Hello, sorrow!" We greet each time we meet. Many years later, Xu Chen admitted to me that he was ashamed when he first realized these artificial things in his nature. -Little Philip's mother died, and he was very motivated by the sentimental scene he caused while crying. "I blushed and threw the book in my hand far away. Maugham, a sharp British guy, didn't have any friends around him when he was damned! But I always loved him, and his books are the ones I read most often. Take it off the shelf and read."

I could say a lot more about Xu Chen's other outrageously obnoxious personalities, but that doesn't hide the fact that he's the sweetest, most tender lover.He has a tenderness that you can't imagine, a tenderness that you can't imitate no matter how hard you try, his tenderness is enough to drown your head, suffocate your interest in human beings, cut off your connection with the world, and annihilate your life. Personality that makes you want to be his bubble, his mischievous kitten, his red-winged bird, and you hate yourself for not being able to. Thinking about it now, when I am alone with him, I always want to close my eyes, and I always want to sleep very much, I mean really sleep, dazed, unconscious, and the eyelids are pulled together like they want to close Together, it's like being hypnotized.It was a strange sight, he was always talking, and I was always sleeping, and the sun was always hiding behind the clouds very quickly, and time was always passing like an arrow.

This is also easy to explain, people can only dream when they are asleep.As for Xu Chen, sleeping and waking, he was dreaming. Our first youth passed away in this drowsiness. In the end, Xu Chen and I went our separate ways with the initial trauma and the initial understanding we reached, embarked on our own lives and started our own adventures.We have to look at each other from time to time to see where the other party has climbed the mountain, talk about the scenery on our respective journeys, and give some encouragement to the unfortunate party.We don't see each other very often, but we have been on the phone all the time, sometimes once a month, sometimes a year, depending on our situation at the time.Why it must be like this, I don't know, maybe it's because we have a common starting point, maybe it's because we left too many questions for each other.No trouble, it is these questions that connect us together, we are all curious, we all want to know the answer!

We chatted, argued, bickered, discussed many topics, and blamed each other's lives for many years.