Evermore
开学后的一个周天，窗外正在下雨。我睁开眼，好像做了一个很久的梦，一时间我不记得身处大洋彼岸，只记得小学时也是这样一个雨天，我和同学跑过广场，然后悻悻地在教室门口罚站。天色很暗，雷阵雨让空气有点灰，教室的灯光反射一种略带不详的预感。室内与室外仿佛是两个世界，走出教室就跑进了烦恼，走进教室就皈依了童年；一边是现实一边是幻象，我觉得我至今未能走出这种隐喻。大部分关于童年的记忆都是如此，阴雨中的长江大桥，光线昏暗的华师教室，电闪雷鸣的夏日我们挤在走廊上做中考前最后一次模拟考试。
最快乐的记忆是在加拿大，九月末，我从冰箱里偷走一瓶黑啤，悄悄抿了一口之后，骑着自行车从长坡上缓缓滑下，去街心公园荡秋千。或是在周末中午躺在床上，拉开地下室的顶灯，花上一整个下午尝试搞清楚悬疑小说里的两个女主究竟是什么关系。还有一天，大概是唯一一次装病不想去上学，溜去阳台上的秋千沙发，对着后花园、蹦床和后山的森林，沉入梦乡。我真希望自己还能那样沉入什么东西，草地，湖面，或是无限的宇宙，只要能沉到底，有什么东西还在下面托着我，就好。
周三，打完德扑，在沙发上我和J说起期末之后去加州旅行的计划。最近这个月我总是用这个只存在于想象的未来安慰自己，或许在这个漫长的冬天过去之后，还有什么值得期待。23年底我在Irvine回LA的沿海公路上飞驰，收到妈妈的消息说，外公不行了。我麻木得不像自己。从8月听说他脑溢血住院起，我还没见过他一眼。长这么大，我和他说过的话大约不超过10句——有时细数起这个说大不大说小不小家庭里的点点滴滴，其中的凉薄意料之中又令人哭笑不得。那天晚上我把车开上格里菲斯天文台，在偌大城市的星光点点之前，我甘于拥抱自己的渺小。在穹顶之下，一切脆弱都显得那么安全。晚霞消失的时候，我突然很想和妈妈打电话，尽管我也不知道这是为了安慰她还是安慰自己。一连3通电话都没人接，我知道他大概是永远离开了。在开车回民宿的路上，妈妈发来消息，说外公走了。
我一时间竟一滴泪也流不出来。上一次见到他还是21年，唯一的印象是他会在家里吵成一团的时候在阳台上默默抽烟。家里再也没有提起他的死，我也没有回四川送葬，只是后来听说墓碑上弟弟的名字排在第一，苦笑中挤出一句老徐家还是重男轻女，死性不改，然后默契地转移话题。现在想来，好像没有死亡能激起我心里如冬眠一般的悲伤。哀悼是需要爱的，因为死亡意味一种爱的消失，有一种爱再也得不到回应，死亡带走了爱的对象和来源，夺走心里爱占据的位置，留下一个巨大的空洞。大概对我来说，那里从来就是一个空洞，爱没有来过，自然也不会消失。
最近在桌前翻看大一时候的日记，爱与痛的边缘果然是灵感最充沛的时候。许多那时候写下的对于自我的观察，到现在看仍然精确、冷静而诚实得残忍。我很早就知道，好像在我的生命里，所有的美好都不能长存，失去和空虚才是人生常态，所以尽管在那些看似平静的时刻，我仍然会寻找机会，刻意让自己陷入某种把自己掏空的精神内耗，并企图从中提取什么意义。把一天的幸福全部寄托在几件小事上无疑是不幸的，但更不幸的是我知道这种事还会在我身上发生，这种规律出现过，且在可预见的将来会在我身上一直存在。Proust认为他有被人爱的需要，这么看来，我也许是有爱人的需要，或者更详细地说，我有自我感动的需要。如果不这样做，我那充沛的情感无法在单调重复的独自生活中释放。我说服自己沉迷于什么人或事，把我这些多余的情感寄托其上，从这样的自我折磨中感受生活的真实。我因此痛苦、辗转、失眠、焦虑，但如果不这么做，我一潭死水的生活就无法唤起我的任何激情，只有在我这种自己创造的不确定中，我才感到生活和完成任务的区别。本质上说，我对危险有种飞蛾扑火的痴迷。
周二晚上，去看疯狂动物城之前，我去了blue bottle喝咖啡。在00年代的chick flick电影里，这种街角的咖啡店总是要发生什么故事。但是我坐在临打烊的咖啡店，喝着从来一样的nola的时候，我想到了死亡。死亡是灵魂被逼进墙角之后触发的被动防御，如果不这样，生活的痛苦将难以承受，也无法分担。无论身处何方，身边是谁，这种痛苦好像都过于宏大而深邃，像无边宇宙，以至于任何出口都显得无力。上次做梦，梦见人类开发了外太空，我们在不同星球里穿梭上学。忘记发生了什么事，但从某一个节点起我就被这个星球放逐，失去重力，沉进无尽的黑暗。然后我醒了。其实沉落不一定是要宇宙，是什么都可以，我情愿是草地。躺在草地上，让风和落叶把我的头发包裹，让阳光洗刷我的忧郁，就这样很久很久。我想到时时刻刻里，伍尔夫沉湖的那个清晨。其实死亡也可以很美好。
但我是不会死的，虽然我也并不知道还有什么理由活着。于是我蜷缩着睡去，避免去想那些很大的事成为很大的人。哪怕只有一秒钟，请世界停止发生，请地球上所有所有爆炸的空气停止，请所有所谓无量的光明未来停止，请回忆把我带回11岁，带回那个长长的山坡，让我一直滑下去，滑到最底。让一切都回到从前，回到在偌大的陆家嘴望着灯火通明的办公楼幻想成人世界的时候，回到在黄浦江边骑着自行车逆行被警察追赶的日子，快睡吧，再也不要醒来。
A Sunday after the start of term. Rain against the glass. I opened my eyes as if pulling myself out of a dream that had gone on too long, and for a breath I didn’t realize I was on the other side of the Pacific. What I remembered instead was being small—a rainy day just like this one, sprinting across the school plaza with a friend, then the two of us standing in sulky disgrace outside the classroom door. The sky hung low and bruised. Thunder had smudged the air grey, and the light spilling from the classroom carried something almost like a premonition. The threshold was a border between worlds: step out and tumble into worry, or step back in and surrender to childhood. One foot in the real, one in the imagined. I think I still live in that metaphor. Nearly all my childhood memories have this same weather—the Yangtze Bridge dissolving in drizzle, the murky classrooms at Huashi, the summer storm that pushed us into the hallway to take our last mock exam before high school entrance tests, lightning splitting the sky outside.
The happiest memories belong to Canada. Late September. I smuggled a dark beer from the fridge, let a mouthful fizz against my tongue, then coasted my bike down a long slope to the park to drift back and forth on the swings. Or: a Saturday afternoon in the basement, ceiling light buzzing, an entire day lost trying to untangle whether the two women in a mystery novel were actually one. And once—the single time I ever pretended to be sick—I escaped to the porch swing on the upstairs balcony, the backyard spread below me like a diorama: trampoline, garden, the dark fringe of forest on the hill. I fell asleep there. I wish I still knew how to fall like that. Into grass, a lake, the whole stupid infinite universe—it doesn’t matter what, as long as the falling never stops and something at the bottom is still there to catch me.
Wednesday night. After poker, slouched on the couch, I told J about the idea of driving down the California coast once finals are done. All month I’ve been nursing this imaginary future like a candle in cupped hands—proof, maybe, that there’s still something worth reaching on the far side of winter. In late 2023 I was tearing along the Pacific Coast Highway from Irvine back to LA when my mother’s text came through: Grandpa’s fading. I felt nothing, or nothing I recognized as mine. He’d been in the hospital since August—a brain hemorrhage—and I hadn’t visited once. Over the course of my entire life, I’m not sure I ever spoke ten full sentences to the man. When you hold this family up to the light and count the small cruelties, the distance between us is as predictable as it is ridiculous. That evening I drove up to Griffith Observatory. Standing before the city’s million scattered lights, I let myself feel small, and for once that smallness was a relief. Under the dome, fragility had permission to exist. As the last color drained from the sky I wanted, suddenly, to call my mother, though whether to comfort her or to be comforted, I couldn’t say.
Three calls. No answer. I already knew. On the drive back to the rental, her text arrived: He’s gone.
Not a single tear. The last time I saw him was 2021, and the only image I can summon is his silhouette on the balcony, smoking in silence while the family fought over some trivial matter on the dinner table. After he died no one brought it up again. I didn’t fly back to Sichuan for the burial. The only detail that reached me later was that my younger brother’s name had been carved first on the headstone. I half-laughed, half-winced, said something about the Xu name and their eternal devotion to sons over daughters, and the conversation drifted away. Now, looking back, I wonder whether there could be any death that could wake the grief sleeping at the bottom of me. To mourn you need love, because death is a kind of love vanishing, an enduring love forever in vain. Death confiscates both the one who loved and the one who was loved, clears out the room love occupied, and leaves a hole the exact shape of what used to be there. But for me, I think the room was always empty. Love never moved in, so there was nothing to evict.
I’ve been sitting at my desk rereading the journal I kept freshman year. The seam between love and pain really is where language comes easiest. So much of what I observed about myself back then still reads, even now, as uncomfortably precise, calm, almost surgically cruel. I figured it out early: nothing good in my life is allowed to stay. Loss and hollowness are just realities. So even in the quiet stretches, I go looking for ways to gut myself from the inside, to hollow myself out on purpose, and try to find something worth keeping in what’s left. Pinning an entire day’s happiness on two or three small mercies is pitiable enough, but worse is knowing I’ll do it again. This pattern has shown up before, and I can see it stretching out ahead of me for as long as I bother to look. Proust thought he needed to be loved. Maybe what I need is to love; or, more honestly, to be wrecked by my own loving. Without that, all this excess feeling has nowhere to go; it just pools in the stillness of a life lived alone and repeated. So I talk myself into obsession—a person, a project, a fixation I can bleed into—and in the bleeding I finally feel that life is not just an assignment I’m completing. It costs me sleep, peace, stability. But without it my days are stagnant water and nothing, nothing moves. I only feel alive inside the turbulence I create. At bottom, I suppose, I have a moth’s obsession with the flame.
Tuesday evening, before catching Zootopia, I ducked into Blue Bottle. In a 2000s rom-com, a café on a corner like this one would be a set piece for a classic meet-cute story. But I sat in the near-empty shop with my usual New Orleans iced coffee, and the thought of death caught me. Death as the soul’s last reflex, the emergency brake it pulls when the weight of being alive becomes too much to carry and too private to share. No matter where you are, no matter who sits across from you, that weight is so vast and so deep that every possible exit looks like a joke. In my last dream, humanity had expanded into space; we commuted between planets the way you’d take a bus to school. Something happened—I’ve forgotten what—but at some point the planet spat me out and I lost gravity, sinking through a darkness that went on and on. Then I woke up. But sinking doesn’t have to be the void. It could be anything. I’d rather it were grass. Lying on the grass, the wind folding leaves into my hair, the sun slowly rinsing the sadness from my skin, staying that way for a long, long time. I thought of the opening of The Hours—Woolf filling her pockets with stones, walking into the river. Death, too, can be gentle.
But I won’t die. Even if I really can’t name a single reason to keep going. So I curl into myself and let sleep take over, refusing to think about becoming someone huge or meaning something great. For even just one second, let the world hold its breath. Let all the exploding air on earth go still. Let all those supposedly limitless, supposedly radiant futures go quiet. Let memory reel me back to eleven years old, to the top of that long hill, and let me roll all the way down to the bottom. Let everything rewind. To standing tiny along the Bund of Shanghai, neck craned toward the lit-up towers, imagining what it meant to be grown. To pedaling the wrong way along the Huangpu River and hearing the cops whistle behind me, legs pumping, laughing. Go to sleep now, babe, and may tomorrow forever be a wonderful secret.
