My Alleged Husband

Chapter 899: Chapter 830_2

Dad, do you know? I once read a book where it said: In my whole life, I asked you for directions once, and in your whole life, you waved to me once!

I often feel moved by this raw and forthright growth, and at the same time, I feel sorrow for today’s young people. They keep swapping names online, and true sincerity in romance has become elusive. Without real love, all that’s left is just lust. Time and again, I ponder how I should live my life. No matter how angry I got with myself, no matter what he did or said, I just liked him. No matter how much others thought my wife was unworthy of me, I just liked her, and there was nothing they could do. The subtle glances told me they saw me as an irrational monster. Then so be it—a monster is a monster. After all, beauties can love beasts. I consoled myself, thinking, perhaps I am just a Prince who has already been cursed by magic. Deep within me, the one I love forever will only be my wife. That will never, ever change. Time and again I walked behind my wife. For ten full years, I searched for her without ever forgetting. Because countless times, I kept searching. I wanted to know where she truly was. I wanted to know what she had become. I wanted to know if she still remembered me.

When I am facing all the trees, I can’t help but feel that each of them is like a pitiful child. This is the only way I can define them. It’s as though I myself were a weathered monk who has seen through all the ways of the world. Heaven knows how much younger I am than those trees. They lack social graces, just like the people in Peach Blossom Spring, who stare blankly at cameras, unable to strike a pose, sing without making accompanying gestures, or step onto a stage to accept an award without thanking the company—just muttering a quick ”thank you” and walking off.

But I’m exhausted from living. They seem to have the faint tendency of breaking free outward. Their voices are purely those of big boys—not professionally trained, yet I can even hear where they make mistakes. This kind of raw, unadorned voice often gives me a poignant and weighty sense of emotion.

I always feel as though the trees are engaging in conversation with me. I hear a tree telling me it feels introverted: it likes singing but not talking; its musically inclined child doesn’t like crowds but prefers the solitary kindness of animals; it thinks humans are dangerous. It hides its eyes with its long hair so as not to see the world too clearly. It’s moved and pained not for its own life’s hardships, but for certain people and certain events. As I listen to what the trees say, deep within me, I think of the melancholic beauty of youth, an era of tender passion and loneliness. I am merely a person who has endured all the inferno-like trials and tribulations alone. All of this was long destined for me to endure—it was written in my fate. There is no way for me to escape. No way to change it. No way to pretend it never happened. This is my life: all that is preordained, bringing me to endure such an end.

I know the underlying music of the trees carries loneliness, an absolute and unrelenting kind of loneliness. This loneliness is not like standing alone on desolate earth after the end of the world, gazing upward at a hauntingly large moon. Rather, it is the loneliness of being surrounded by a crowd of people weaving through each other endlessly, yet feeling lost and adrift. The former is despair, while the latter is cruel despair. I’ve often wondered whether one day I will become like that too. I once read a short story where the only survivor of the apocalypse sat alone in a room, and suddenly, there was a knock at the door. I often think, at that moment, what’s going through the mind of that person—is it fear, confusion, or joy? Perhaps it’s all of the above, or perhaps none. To me, that person is the tree—a lonely guardian of Earth, which is why it resists the outside world so fiercely.

When I understood that the inherent helplessness in certain voices cannot be taught or learned, I felt such deep sorrow in my heart. I think the tree is the saddest of all—it lives a life far sadder than mine. There it stands, with no one truly caring about what it has been through, silently standing guard, unable to ever leave. I don’t understand why, sometimes, flowers can rise from cracks in the stone. The resilience of flowers cannot be described as anything less than a miracle. After all, they are China’s first-ever young band. But how could I know just how much pain I truly feel? Time and again, I reached the peaks of my life, only to slide downward at the moment of breakthrough. It is always like this—death without exception. My only wise choice was the desperate courage to press forward, yet the outcome was always the same. It would just be a more elegantly orchestrated form of death!