like your mustard

Sunday, March 2018, 9

Ruan Xinhe suggested that I keep a diary. He thinks that I will definitely get Alzheimer’s disease when I get old, so I should write down everything I need to remember while my mind is still bright.

My grandfather once had this disease. When I almost got into a fight with Ruan Xinhe over a bottle of soda in the canteen in junior high school, I was called to the office by the head teacher. I don’t know if the head teacher has a brain problem. He opened his mouth and talked nonsense to me. : "Your family is here to pick you up."

"What's the matter?" I still had the sweet taste of just snatching a sip of lemonade in my mouth.

The head teacher said: "I heard that your grandma passed away."

I heard that I walked back to the dormitory while crying, with a lot of tears and snot running down my nose. Ruan Xinhe also jumped up from the commissary to provoke me. The loot I got was handed to me.

The encounters in life are sometimes very strange. You never know who you should meet and when you will part with them.

Friends are like this, relatives are like this.

It was only when I was picked up by my uncle in a Santana that my grandfather was lost.

At that time, I didn’t know that Alzheimer’s disease is a slow peeling process for your loved ones and all attached feelings. On a late spring morning, my grandfather in his 70s went out to buy groceries for a long time with his wallet as usual. He didn't come back, and our whole family knew that he had Alzheimer's disease.

My two uncles respectively invited a fortune teller to find out the directions. My grandpa, who had been lost for several hours, went in that direction. In the end, my younger uncle found my grandpa. Grandpa walked a long, long way. After walking down the road, I walked to the suburbs and countryside, and probably found that I couldn’t get home anyway. When the sun was about to set, I sat on the rice stalks by the roadside and waited for the darkness to come.

When I followed my uncle's car to pick up my grandfather, my grandfather secretly slipped me two dollars in the back seat of the car, a green banknote. It seems that I can't see that kind of money now. I remember it very clearly. The two yuan bills were folded squarely, and grandpa said, "City, go buy candy."

That was probably the last memory my grandfather had of me.

Human beings’ memories of the dead are never perfect. For example, when my grandfather died in my second year of high school, my grandmother gave up my grandfather’s pension insurance and insisted that my grandfather be buried in the ground at birth and refused to go to the crematorium for cremation. I was in the village where my grandfather was born. After walking on the dark country lane for a long time, only the appearance of my grandfather sitting on the sofa or lying on the bed in the past few years after his illness was left in my mind, and no one knew him.

I completely forgot the way he was when I was very young and put his shoulders on my shoulders and secretly took money to buy me candy.

Sometimes memory is really weird, sometimes it is friendly to the living, and sometimes it is not.

When my cousin Zhang Han mentioned my grandfather to me, I vaguely recalled those memories that were forgotten by my grandfather and then forgotten by me.

When Ruan Xinhe and I were chatting on the bed in the dark at night, we would occasionally talk about very broad propositions such as life and death. This kind of thing can only be discussed at night when no one can see anyone's expression.

After all, when a young person talks about life and death, there will always be a feeling of worrying about writing new words. No matter how you look at it, it will make people feel idle.

In fact, human beings should have given up the standard of judging whether a person is mature or immature by age long ago.

Ruan Xinhe and I agreed that life was boring when we were 26 years old, but we didn’t want to die either. We just lived and waited for death. To put it bluntly, this should be what most people in this world are doing now.

That year, half a month before the college entrance examination, Ruan Xinhe and I skipped class to go to an Internet cafe to play DOTA. The shabby Internet cafe suddenly disconnected when we were about to push the base to win. The disconnection took too long, and Ruan Xinhe and I were unwilling to leave. People huddled in an Internet cafe to watch an offline movie.

I actually didn't like that movie very much, and I still don't like it very much.

But I remember a sentence in it. I don’t remember whether it was said by the protagonist or the supporting actor. It said—anyway, people only have to choose one of the two, and they are busy living or busy dying.

Whenever I talk about life ideals with Ruan Xinhe at night, I always think about it - what is the meaning of it, anyway, people are always rushing to die after birth.

Most of the time, Ruan Xinhe would tell me about the process from birth to death. Everyone is different, and every experience is different. This is the meaning.

Sometimes when there are too many worries, he will let me go. He said that he has to get up early tomorrow, go to work, and work hard.

There was another time when he fell into a drowsy sleep. In fact, I also fell into a drowsy sleep. I probably had reached the stage of emotional burnout. At that time, we had no desire to chat with each other at all, and that was probably the only time.

He said, "Dou Cheng."

"Ok?"

"I have met you since I was born, I grew up with you, I am with you, and I will probably grow old together in the future."

"Ok?"

"Is this one of the meanings of life?"

That night when I got up to go to the toilet, I suddenly thought of what he said, and when I got back to bed, I pushed him in the dark with the light of my phone charging: "It's so disgusting. If there is only love in life, it would be too much." Are you stupid?"

I always feel that human beings should have greater and more ambitious things to do.

Ruan Xinhe was very impatient to be woken up by me, he pulled the quilt over his head, and cursed me vaguely: "Crazy."

I turned on the bed, stretched my legs and kicked him lightly, and his feet came out from under the quilt and rested on my calves: "Damn, I have to go to work tomorrow, so go to sleep."

Damn, I have to go to work tomorrow.