Peach Blossom Burning
Zhou Xiaofeng
Many years have passed, and I still remember that pair of oblivious lovers. When I look down from the window, I see two figures hugging each other, one dark blue, one light brown - separated by eight floors of floor height, they are like in an abyss. On one side was the back wall of the dump, and on the other the wall of broken glass slanted at the top of the family compound - the middle passageway was originally used for vehicle transportation of garbage, but the families protested, blocking the original exit and rerouting it to a different route, and it became a dead end where no one came and went. They kissed, and occasionally their hands explored each other's skin under the cover of their sweaters . For me, as a teenager, it was a frightening and mesmerizing sight. Even though I was far away, and the two people who were intimate didn't have time to look away, I was worried about being caught ...... pulling the curtains closed, and then peering through the cracks, heartbeat after heartbeat.
Since then for several consecutive afternoons, this pair of lovers are secret rendezvous. Did they not realize that countless pairs of eyes like mine might lurk in the building across the street? Was there no more suitable place for them to be intimate, so much so that they had to choose the vicinity of this musty, stinking dump to hoop each other for hours on end? Even the sudden rain didn't stop them, laying a plastic sheet on the muddy, rain-slicked ground, and throughout the afternoon they kissed as if they were on their way to the executioner's chamber, endlessly and desperately.
The leaves swirling in the fall wind piled up at their feet, like butterflies about to die in their slumber this season. From time to time, fallen leaves drifted onto the men's clothes or the women's hair. The leaves were like paper money, scattered around the two not-so-young lovers, who were y tormented by their lust. Slowly, my enthusiasm for watching turned into sadness because the scene was too much like a funeral. If it's a funeral for love, the two seeming protagonists are just martyrs in the struggle.
Every weekend, I boarded a long-distance bus to the northern suburbs to visit my secret lover. After all this time on this road, I still feel like a night bird on its first migration, traveling in secret to an end it cannot know. The windowpane reflected my face in a growing trance.
With a poor memory, I often forget names and things, and am dismissed as arrogant by those who don't know. But I remembered the names of the stops along the road that would not get off, remembered the joys and sorrows of the earliest sitting on this train, and even remembered the occasional stranger. Last week the Cantonese passenger next to me asked me for directions, speaking in Cantonese Mandarin that made every word produce an exclamation point effect, with such force and dramatic expression that I have never been able to stand men who talk with too much expression and movement. He had the typical Pearl River Delta looks and exuded the revolting breath of a man suffering from dental caries or gastrointestinal problems. I watched his mouth open and close noiselessly and walked away for a moment, and I thought Wizard ...... He is the kind of person whose soul and face look very similar, so there is a special kind of concentration when looking at people, as if gazing at you from the depths, which is easy to make people have the illusion of deep love. His deadly tone, which may not be perfect when he sings but is absolutely moving when he speaks, makes me want to listen.
The dust storm filled the entire compartment, and the yellowish remnants of the sun looked particularly disheveled and dirty. The empty seat in front of me leaves a visible buttock print. I saw a cyclist outside the window, bowing his back, pedaling desperately, handlebars wobbling. The weather was bad, and the bike had a flat tire, but he jumped off to check it and then stepped back on, as if he didn't believe it, his movements so clumsy and strained. I thought to myself, my feelings are like a bicycle with a leaky door core, not only is it not a means of transportation, it has become a burden. Why don't I just throw it away and have the freedom of lightness? Was it because it was treated as a possession, or because of the secret hope that a mechanic store would be waiting, rescue-like, up ahead? If my arrival is not a reward, does leaving count as a punishment? I debated whether to turn the car around and go back, to end a pleasure that was beginning to wear me out. I think the one who tries to leave has to be careful of his last lingering - that, like weight resting on a perilous bridge, can make a fatal difference to the end.
Love is extremely slow. Because of its slowness, by the time I realized I was in love with the Wizard, it had become a habit that was hard to kick. I loved him like the root of a word loves the offsets that change its destiny. Even if he were a wild wanderer who would be driven by his own stumbling fate, I would love the wandering evil in him.
One day I arrived just as he was coming out to get the paper. In winter, the wizard was still barefoot in slippers, and the road was muddy and slippery after the snow melted, so I saw his clean toes exposed, his wet hair, and his eyes glowing as red as a bunny's after a bath. He walks lazily, shuffling his shoes carelessly and thoughtfully, with a kind of aristocratic air in the midst of his laziness.
It is difficult to resist his call, as long as he calls, I will change all the schedule, take a bumpy coach ...... like a delivery, no need to make an appointment, at any time to send the rolling service. I am like a guide dog, when he is in the dark and low, I offer my burning little tongue, attentively licking and kissing his palm, as if I can find there the food that feeds me to live. His pickiness in selection seemed to imply that some special talent was necessary to become his lover-favor, favor, and his favor was descending favor. The Wizard is so tall that I need to stand on tiptoe to kiss ...... along the growing stem and offer a humble flower.
But this man who meant mystery and wonder to me, I did not really know. The Wizard was much older than me, somewhere between uncle and brother, and our relationship was gradually and deliberately made ambiguous, and I felt both respect for him and something strange and ineffable in the blending of innocence and incestuous pleasure. He was in the pampered fall, and my spring had just broken its chrysalis. There is a huge difference between day and night, and the point is, do two people in different longitudes experience the moment of love at the same time in the time difference?
One doesn't know what kind of pieces one will memorize, or what kind of changes they will cause, just as one doesn't know which pollen will brew the fruit of silence. I remember the first day.
It was raining outside while sitting in the car with the Wizard. I craned my head around, and the rain outside the window looked like old film with dense scratches. The rain was getting louder. The conversation breaks down for a long time, and a pressure of silence slowly builds between us. The Wizard is smoking a cigarette, and he has a naturally seductive air, even if his face is slightly weary-weariness, the physical manifestation of sadness. Dear Wizard, I can't know your hidden pain, you seem so at ease, but I smell you, and it's a murderous odor: you have all the charms of a middle-aged man to be loved, but have lost all your capacity to love. By the time I realized that passion was coming dangerously close to me, it was already too late ...... the eagle was already lowering its height, and so the monks of the wilderness opened the lapel robes of sacrifice. My hijacking had begun. This is the first embrace.
After the rain stopped, I was surprised to find that the roof of the car fell full of knocked down peach blossoms: wet, fine, brightly colored. These radiant little petals, reminiscent of patterns in a kaleidoscope, with seemingly endless variations even from the simplest confetti - can always keep me mesmerized and grateful. I can't help but look at him as he drives, still in a low-fever trance. I have the lungs of an accordion, the pipes of a flute ...... love symphony, turning my body into a secret orchestra.
I thus perceive happiness - happiness, a word so banal that it is a little hard to say. Yes, I know what it's like to be "happy as hell" in his proximity. The reason why I am "dying of happiness" is that I subconsciously don't believe that happiness can continue, and I hope that the state of happiness can stop and be fixed when I am sober and intoxicated. I am afraid of the flash of happiness, and the hesitation and regret it brings after a short period of happiness. In fact this statement hides the truth that happiness is going to die, and all the happiness that comes with it will be the beauty of an early death.
- Now I slowly licked the limited layer of frosting on the expired pastry, rough little particles, melting on the tip of my tongue ...... This once complacent sweet memory, more than anything else, made me feel the ruinous life sinking.
There are like toys, not a necessity of life, both bring joy and useless, I am the magician's smallest lover. The Wizard's talent and experience gave him the ability to manipulate perfectly; my experience, to him, was like a number after a decimal point that could be graciously discarded. The time I went to fast food with him, the flower girl handed me some roses - where did I find such dirty roses? The color was like menstrual blood. To get away from the flower girl, I said without blinking, "He's my dad." Yes, the Wizard, with his overabundance of emotional experiences, was pretty much my only romantic history. With him, I was ignorant, he was invincible, and the situation lacked basic control, except for the late-bloomer-like receipt of his arranged education.
He was able to approach emotional relationships with a looseness and ease, and I don't know whether this was an illusion of his carelessness or whether it was supposed to be a calmness that he had distilled from experience. It is sometimes suspected that the Wizard is only slightly more kind and patient with me than gentlemen generally harbor with women. My feelings were too strong to always appreciate his unperturbed demeanor in contrast. The Wizard is accustomed to maintaining a frequency of intimacy without close association, a frequency that is more like fluidity, or indifference?
He never scribbles, giving adultery a little more distorted warmth. There is something both frenzied and always cherished about making love to a wizard. The wizard is able to be so free, untortured in his enjoyment, presumably because I lack the most important things that cannot be compensated for by effort: beauty and intelligence. The question is, how can the obstacles be resolved when they are discovered, can I preserve dignity as Jane Eyre inspired Rochester to say - "If God had given me beauty and fortune, I would have made it as hard for you to leave me as I have now made it hard for me to leave you. But God has not done so, but our souls are equal, as we all cross the grave and stand before Him"? All that is not won in the field of love by talent cannot be won by begging, let alone by pleading and education.
Among the various types of love, the way I am more accustomed to and good at is the secret love and the goodbye that no one knows. I am so familiar with love where the other person is not present that I can easily handle missing. But to the magician, I simply have nothing to do ...... as if the unmarried mother gave birth to her own deformed baby, like a punishment, guilty pleasure. Perhaps my love has something to do with a self-mutilating tendency: I love and only love what makes me despair. Self-mutilation is the need to derive pleasure from self-harm, and I was born with an unresolvable and persistent hatred of myself. Through the Wizard, I finally came to the realization that love is the most pervasive and dominant means of human self-abuse. Think of the French writer La Rothfoucauld who said, "When we judge love by its primary effect, it is more like hate than love."
Some people are amazingly energized, energized, and wonderfully rich in love. I am so undeniably so, that once I am in the midst of a relationship, my meager eloquence disappears, and I become tense, tedious, afflicted, and indecisive. Under the pressure of love, I experienced my own metamorphosis and saw myself transformed into a cringing, clumsy beetle.
Love in the world often looks similar but is fundamentally different. For example, love for a pet and love for a collection are two very different kinds of love. It is the pet's dependence, its plea for feeding, its absolute need for its owner, which spawns the owner's compassion. The collection, the collection of its owner never emotional reaction, collectors and then long indulgence it is indifferent, the collection may change the collection of its object, but does not cause the original collector's resentment, he will only be in love and nostalgia to witness its gradual increase in value, and increase the weight of it in the heart. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to be belittled by the other party. Pets bring the owner only entertainment items, only collectibles, can become real wealth. In a sense, I am a pet of the wizard, and I am unfortunate enough to have the wizard become my collection. The wizard never seemed to realize that my ecstasy and despair were all controlled by him and given alternately. He had an air of innocence mixed with angels and demons.
Dozens of floors high, on the top terrace, the summer night winds blowing voluminously ...... the depths of the darkness of all silence, he went deep into me. This man who creates suspense in my life, my hands caress him - only I love, give you the body on the string. How symmetrical are lips and lips, and when the magician removes his face, I see: how the stars are full of holes, how the night reveals its humble nature. Stirring me with agitation, the Wizard did not know how quickly his god-like face that shone upon me, and the whole brokenness of heaven, were replaced before my eyes. He leaves me warring between the burning heat of my flesh and the chill of my heart. Because love eventually falls back to the horizon, or even back into the abyss, the so-called passion is the height of disregard for life and death that you dare to rise.
In the celebratory physical love, the sky, suddenly bloomed a grand fireworks ...... God lit a short comforting torch, I was in the reflection of the tears. This spring is tattooed, gorgeous, and rebellious - it has become a fossilized memory, like a shell, hard embedded pattern, wrapped inside the soft.
We calm down. I put my left ear close to the Wizard's forehead and listen to the heartbeat: there is a lazy clock inside, hands that have gradually stopped because of silence and loneliness, because of calmness and coldness. After the fireworks, the darkness gathers again; after the ardor, the wizard's eyes return to peace. He smokes, and places the cigarette holder on my bare spine. We are both in solitude, but we can't help or give to each other, like two swimming fish in a glass tank, we can't even communicate with each other's voices, how can we talk about being together? Blind as we are, we are all trapped chrysalises, no matter how much we love each other, the darkness is our own and cannot be shared. A world where you can't see your face, you can't guess the complexity of each other's expressions.
Happiness has a mouth that is good at promises and betrayals, and I remember the tenderness that characterizes that intrigue. Throughout dinner, it seemed as if some gas hovered over the Wizard's head like a hat, then drifted away, distracting me. The Wizard looked at me with the same eyes that seemed to have the same bone-deep illusion of preoccupation. I couldn't taste it, eating something with that odd texture, like I was tearing at a bat's wing, something that was neither meat nor skin, something that said bone or sinew. I chewed expressionlessly, tenaciously digesting food and love that was hard to categorize and hard to swallow. How can I recognize the darkness inside me as a short trip through a tunnel?
Those who love me give me gifts, and those I love give me wounds - clearly the giving from the latter is more precious, for it is only the wounds, with which I am connected in the true sense of flesh and blood, that occur. I found a rubber band wrapped in fabric in the Wizard's private bathroom. It was next to the soap box, the soap lather forming an encased layer of white stains. Not a paranoid guess, intuition told me who it belonged to. So she had long hair, did she take a shower and walk around with it wet? She sometimes tied her hair up, sometimes left it loose, before she occasionally forgot it, right? She was one of the Wizard's lovers too, I just don't want to break it to myself. His emotional project, built by many women at once. When I hugged the wizard, he clearly had the scent of someone else that didn't belong to him and hadn't been removed even after a bath.
I want to get a sense of security from the wizard like a father like a brother. But is this security? Two arms hanging on a high rope, a little loose, all is lost ...... everything depends on the support of oneself. There is no rest in such love, for it is not a safety net on which you can sleep. Love is a place of right and wrong, and God has given up managing it. Only in desperate love can one experience this violent confrontation with oneself and, well, the painful tearing. My knife and fork mechanically scratch the plate. I am a civilized beast, and I eat my own flesh.
When I was a child getting an injection in kindergarten, crying was a normal reaction for children, but as a child I desperately tried to restrain the tears that were about to come to my eyes, to the point of giggling. In the face of my own predicament, I was born with an exaggerated comedic disguise - the more twisted inside, the more comical the expression. The pain was in the left ventricle of my heart, counterclockwise, rippling and gradually expanding, spreading throughout my limbs. As I chewed hard, grinding off the tough meat fibers, I said to the Wizard with a raised eyebrow, "If the cannibals caught us all in captivity, some of us killed and skinned to make drums, and some of us killed and burned to roast, you'd be best suited to raise them to extract the musk. Know what? You'll leave a scent tunnel when you walk through it, and I'll be able to find you in the scent no matter how dark it gets."
After saying this, the world went black. There was a sudden power outage and more sounds of people walking in the hallway. Without a word, I stride unimpeded through the pitch blackness, taking a couple of popsicles out of the fridge and following the smell back to the Wizard precisely. He was still sitting there, thinking I had brought candles. I sat on him, just in the darkness, hugging his neck, my chin on his shoulder, my legs wrapped around his waist, not looking at his face. I started eating one after the other. I was shivering from the cold, one bite at a time, biting down on the hard ice. Love is swallowing, constantly and hard. The food passes through the esophagus and begins to be buried for miles ...... His kisses toward the deep throat dive just as ...... far down and down. Sex and anus so close together, glorified love next to unmentionable filth. ***The same food in the different digestive tracts of the wizard and me, descending, stirred by the juices secreted by each, and in the end just as foul. I can't imagine rotten love, even if it rots in front of my eyes, it still feels unimaginable - I'm so useless, imagination is the only means of survival solution I can employ, it's ineffective.
When one retires from a great love that rots, one often finds oneself a tainted witness to the past. And I loved the Wizard with a determination to defy the rest of the opposite sex, with a childlike ignorance displaced by all my intelligence, with uninteresting chastity and sacrifice, with habit and necessity, with a blind waiting to follow through before death, to prove how irrevocably I loved - like a wrong answer sheet that had already been handed in.
The fish that the magician had given me died at last. I had witnessed its suicidal behavior before, leaping out of the tank and landing in the sand. I struggled with my feelings as I did with this dehydrated fish, devoid of grace and the lucid eyes it had originally managed to keep in its sleep ...... The fish was on the ground, it ached, suffocated, dusty, and in its clumsy writhing and wrestling, its silver colored scales - the most beautiful of its body's ornamentation, flaked off in droves.
I put the immobile fish under the faucet, letting the water crash into its mouth, which opened wide and closed again when I removed it from the current. I just gave it artificial respiration, with the fish's wet, side-by-side tail resting on my palm. A few times, I thought it had come back to life, its mouth seeming to open and close of its own accord. But the last resuscitation was ineffective. I reluctantly set it back down in the tank, its still-round, unblinking eyes softly soaking in the water. Snow White can still be awakened by living in a crystal coffin, but it will, slowly, decay, from the surface, to the innards. The dead fish's former companions swam away in disgust, circling its corpse from afar - while it floated, like an angel, higher than them. I know that everything is going to die, die on the mortuary bed of time. Slowly, there will be no evidence to be found that any wizard has loved me - like the strength of a vegetable, the memories of a baby, the warmth of the hands of the departed, how important are these things that have no traces even if they exist?
Autumn is here, and the gods are brewing golden syrup in the heavens. Drinking this fall, I became confused from intoxication, and fell from prudence into gullibility ...... The wizard I had loved had forgotten before I sobered up. He will thus dismantle the secret garden in my body.
I buried the dead fish under a pine tree in the square downstairs. A man in roller skates and streamlined tights, looking like an athlete, speed-skates past me into the crowd. The winery is running a promotion where each person gets a free glass of champagne. This autumn afternoon, charming light, street park, road, kiosk ...... everywhere is drinking champagne people. Some drank it all in one go, some sipped it slowly, and a sense of awakened enjoyment appeared on their faces. I didn't want the gift; it was enough to see the long lines of people registering, in droves of joy, holding aloft the shaking glass from the tray of spilled liquor. But I need this joy. I needed this joy to support the funeral of a nameless dead fish. I bought a bottle of dry red from the grocery store and sat in a street chair with a somewhat wobbly bottom foot, and I drank alone. So many people, so many wine foam golden, only my glass, blood red.
Taking memories one bite at a time builds up strength, like clockwork being wound tight one at a time. Nothing is more powerful and patient than revenge. The wizard will not notice what I have stolen from him. A grain of sand enters, and after a hard swallow and wrapping, it will take on the uncanny halo of color found on a bead. I will turn myself into a beaded shell and hide the treasures of a lifetime.
As I ironed my daughter's school uniform, I knew that another tiny daughter was sleeping deep in the womb. When I first saw her from the ultrasound, she was immersed in my gradually filling amniotic fluid, like a little mermaid being swam in the navy blue seabed - she looked so sweetly timeless, like a formalin fetus isolated from life and death. When she surfaces, even if she will also be adoring a man who will eventually betray and leave her, I know deep down that she will be given an ascension in salvation from the disaster.
In the room, the broad-leaved plants are y green, and the vase is slanted with a few branches of freshly folded peach blossoms: colorful and broken small. Empty glass tank, I no longer feed the petulant and indifferent fish. Only a cautious turtle, silent, like a voyeur, slowly, poking out its mottled ugly squashed head.
Zhou Xiaofeng , born in Beijing in June 1969, has been a literary editor for more than 20 years, and is now a professional writer at the Laoshe Literary Institute in Beijing.
She has published essay collections such as "Spotting a Map on a Bestiary", "Collecting a Magic Book of Time", "Your Body is a Wonderland", "Deaf Angels", "The Giant Whale Sings", "There is a Migratory Bird", etc. She has been awarded with Lu Xun Literature Prize, People's Literature Award, October Literature Prize, and Chinese Literature and Media Awards, etc. She started her creation of children's literature in 2017, and published children's stories, "Little Wings" and "Star Fish", which were awarded with the China's Good Book and the Best Children's Book of the Year in China's Children's Book List.