Before a trip, I search online for the places I’m going, checking the customs, landscapes and scenery. I always tell myself: step on the road of a place, drink its water, and you have to experience it. If life stays this repetitive, it’s better to go watch others live. Every beginning means forgetting something—like work and burdens, replaced perhaps by that impulse, that dream of freedom. On the road I want to write something down, but after a while I don’t feel like picking up the pen—after a while it gets dull, after a while I grow tired of that feeling.

That year, you had an accident, and I didn’t go back—I just couldn’t accept it, always believing you’d live a hundred years. Life truly is unpredictable. In those years we were as bland as plain water, childish, understanding nothing, not even rational—living on in a daze. When unhappy, we’d go watch the sea together. But now, for us busy getting by—what is survival, anyway? And what about life? None of us can outrun time. Perhaps the only thing that can is—youth, I suppose.

From the moment we’re born, we start planning—when to walk, when to go to school, when to marry, when to die; even escaping needs careful planning. But reality is always so harsh: ideas without execution become nothing but a topic in the end.

Somewhere along the way, I started to love recording life with a lens, purely for the sake of recording. Looking at those photos, one day we’ll forget where we went, who we met, what happened, what we left behind. The only container that ever fills up is the ticket stub—and we are merely a memory of an instant. You know? The words on a movie ticket fade with time, just like the person who watched the movie with you back then…

PS: I spread a few newspapers on the ground, put my luggage down, and sat outside the window of the corner store, holding the MP3 player, listening to music while watching the travelers come and go. I really hoped to find her, but I searched for a long, long, long time. Turning my head, I noticed a girl sitting nearby, seriously grading exam papers—probably a teacher. We looked at each other and exchanged a polite smile. She went back to grading, and I picked up my phone and wrote a few lines.

“Train Dxxxx bound for xx from Fuzhou has now begun boarding…” I shouldered my luggage, rolled up the newspaper, and walked to the boarding gate. Walking on, it seems I forgot to say—goodbye!

END Fuzhou Station