Rebirth: Truth Does Not Dig Coal

The painter and I should be old acquaintances.

I haven't remembered his name yet.

Behind the consciousness of swelling pain, something gradually became clear.Intuition is very strange.I must have known the painter, but felt that I had never really known him.What is he usually like?I have a vague idea.Just like a painter to me, the distance is immeasurable. Sometimes I have the impression of a sea of ​​grass and waves, and the surrounding is green and cold, which is closer to wildness than livestock. There is also the scene of an extinct volcano crater, deserted and uninhabited, filled with a choking atmosphere of rust spots. .This notion made me aware of a state, a state of solitude, of arrogance.Back to the dream of the Bauhinia flower.The painter looked at me on the side of the road, holding a cigarette in his left hand. Under my gaze, he slightly raised his jaw and took a puff of cigarette, then smiled.At this moment, he should be very close to me again.

Only 24 hours left in the countdown.The painter was lying on the ground, and I was standing beside him. The two of us, like scavengers exiled by time, had nothing and were forced to stay with each other. He couldn't even see me.I can feel that something has trapped him and me in this day, I can't say what it is, it is far bigger than human can reach, more startling than the boundaries of human imagination.He was a painter, a medieval serf, a crater savage, and much more.I am the owner of this mobile phone, a traveler who lights a candle on a rainy night, a corpse with a heart growing outside his body, and much more than that.Whether I walked into the dream or the dream created me, it was always about me.In a sense, the painter and I are a whole, facing the moment when the waiting time goes to zero.

As for the result?I have no idea.Since I became conscious for a short time, everything I have experienced with the painter all points to pessimism.Like the chief war criminal waiting to be tried by the court-martial of the opposing camp, it is difficult to expect the result after the loss of life.But resignation or obedience is against my nature.I just can't figure out what the point of my existence is.

Well, let's go back to the original assumption.Suppose I am dead, and I am a ghost, or some kind of energy body left over from the dead.So it stands to reason that I should be reincarnated, and I should be decomposed into the original matter of the universe, which should not be like this now.The question is, why do I have to hang around the painter in this form?What can I get?

Obviously, the relationship between me and the painter is more complicated than ordinary entanglements.It's hard to describe the feeling.I looked at him, respected him, understood him, and he saw me in the dream, and the sadness also made me feel the same way.I have no specific regrets about life, only an unspeakable feeling, the inescapable lightness of life when awake, the unbearable essence of pain before death, and perhaps more than that.I can't tell.

It is often said that ghosts are tied to obsessions in life. No matter whether you love or hate the past, there are always some obsessions that cannot be closed.Then I stay here, maybe there is something unfinished.It's just that I'm not impressed.

The television set tilted in the corner of the living room continued to play the screen, and the movie shots were like petrels flickering sporadically, turning on and off, and there were conversations in low voices.

The painter lay motionless on the floor surrounded by garbage.

18: 55: 32

Suddenly there was the sound of the doorbell at the door.

one sound.

Twice.

No one opened the door.

Then there was a knock on the door.The person outside knocked on the door very restrainedly, knocked it three times very rhythmically, and said to the door, "Young Master Yan, are you there?"

The painter didn't respond.

The person outside the door said, "The old man is running out of time. Madam can't contact you. Please ask me to bring you a message: the last time, she will go to the hospital with you."

After waiting for a while, there was still no answer, and the outsider continued, "Madam said, if you still have no news, she will come in person tomorrow."

The outsider didn't get a response for a long time, and finally left.

17: 23: 18

There was no sound at the gate, the painter suddenly raised his hand, and swiped towards the gate, as if he couldn't hold his breath in desperation, "Get out, don't bother me."

I stood beside the painter, waiting for the candle on his index finger to be lit.Time is running out and sitting still is not my style.

15: 59: 44

The painter fell asleep again, and the flames began to grow.

I then fell into a short and chaotic nightmare with him.

Every time I woke up, the urgent suffocation that I was born with him at the same time became more and more intense.The painter got up from the ground, shaking his skeleton, more like a wild ghost than me.

He started rummaging through the medicine bottle, poured out a handful of pills with shaking hands, and took a hasty gulp of wine.

13: 59: 44

I once again grasped the cluster of candles.

The scene finally stabilized.

I emerged on a stretch of ocean, loose on all fours, floating on my back.Not far away is a huge ship, covering the sky and the sun, and the propeller rotates at a constant speed, wringing out long white foam in the sea.

The ship is coming towards me.In order not to be dragged into the bottom of the water by this ship, I tried to change my posture the moment I found out the situation, but found that I couldn't move my body, and I couldn't make a sound when I wanted to shout something. I could only turn my eyeballs to shift my sight.

Well, this time I am an inexplicable floating corpse in the boundless ocean.

I turned my eyeballs to look for the trace of the painter, and suddenly a hook was thrown from the deck of the ship next to it. The hook was sharp, a bit like a large meat hook commonly used in slaughterhouses, and the rope was long enough to extend to the surface of the sea.

The people on the boat seemed to be fishing for something with this hook. After a while, they pulled something out of the sea.The sun was shining brightly in the dream, and I couldn’t see clearly what the salvaged thing was from my point of view. I just felt that it was heavy, and after breaking through the water, it fell from my body.

The people on the ship unloaded the thing on the deck, and continued to throw the hook down, ready to salvage.

It didn't take long to get the second thing, and it was closer to my position this time.I stared intently at the thing picked up from the hook, only to find that it looked a bit like a human being.Is it also a floating corpse?Will it be a painter?

After I took a closer look, I found that the human-looking thing seemed to be much thinner than the first one, and it had a lot of black strands that looked like long hair dripping with water.If it was a corpse, it should be that of a woman.

This is a painter's dream, the painter will not be absent, if not in the sea, it may only be related to the ship.The female body was unloaded on the deck, and the hook continued to be salvaged, and I began to wait for it to be picked up.Despite the preparations, the salvage happened faster than I expected.

As soon as the third hook touched the water, it came to me almost instantly.The hook swayed before my eyes in a very clever arc, piercing my floating chest.

There's no pain, but for some reason it's somewhat realistic to the touch.When the sharp blade pierces through the chest, I always feel that the same place has really been cut by some iron.It doesn't hurt, but there is still a lingering fear at first glance.In the process of being salvaged and lifted by the hook at a constant speed, I was thinking about whether the touch just now had something to do with my direct death.If the answer is yes, then I can almost deduce that my intuition is valid.Indirect evidence that all my concepts and intuitions about all builds of the painter should work as well.

Then maybe I really stayed here to accomplish something.

I was salvaged on deck, and had a good view of the ship.

The deck is actually a feast of decorations.

The boat platform is vast, and an unconventional round table is placed. Under the glass turntable, exquisitely embroidered textiles are pressed, and a large bouquet of lilies is placed on the table.Three huge elongated white trays, two of which had already been placed on them, were the two floating corpses I had just watched: a young man and a middle-aged woman, both swollen by the seawater, their bodies more or less There are gaps in the flesh and blood eaten by fish, and no face can be seen.

The third tray is still empty, most likely waiting for me.The hooks are two strong men in suits and leather shoes, without facial features, or these two faces have no meaning in the painter's dream, so they were erased.I was placed on a tray by these two people, lying flat, and spun with the glass turntable and two floating corpses, a man and a woman.

I didn't see the painter at the table, but I saw an old man first.The old man was gray-haired, hale and calm, with a cigar in one hand and a glass of white wine standing beside the ashtray. Looking at his demeanor, he didn't feel anything strange about the three dishes in front of him.

The old man lifted the pair of sterling silver chopsticks carved and hollowed out by his hand, and stretched them towards the first dish.Use the chopsticks to part the clothes on the chest, and pick up the soaked white heart.Put it in your mouth and chew it carefully in your mouth.The old man nodded with a smile, took a sip of the wine, and said, "I told you earlier, the taste will not go wrong."

I don't know who I'm talking to.

Then he stretched out to the second tray, and the old man pinched out the rotten tongue and eyeballs of the middle-aged woman respectively.He ate the eyeballs, put the tongue on a plate beside him, and said, "Ah Ze, try it."

Only then did I realize that there was a boy sitting on the seat next to the old man.

The boy looked no more than thirteen or fourteen years old, pretending to be mature, but he couldn't hide his panic.He clenched his fists extremely hard, staring at the shapeless tongue on the plate, the veins on the back of his hand popped up frequently, as if he really saw a rotten tongue.Under the persuasion of the old man, the boy couldn't avoid it. With a bit of timidity towards the old man, fear of this tongue, and extreme disgust for something, the boy ate the tongue with his chopsticks.

I looked at the young man, his brows were tightly frowned, his facial features were distorted and ferocious while chewing, his whole body was shaking, and he tried his best not to vomit.

The glass carousel eventually came to me.I looked at the old man, he was indifferent, and probably couldn't see my line of sight.I began to analyze the identity of this old man, who almost occupied an unshakable dominant position in this dream.The rest of the people, including me, the three corpses that were tributed into vegetables, and a young man who was forced to eat the corpse despite his nausea, were all dominated roles.

At this time, the old man's chopsticks reached out to me, and he pulled out a small piece of bone with meat from my lumbar spine, and put it on the young man's plate.

Under the urging of the old man, the young man almost didn't want to look at the food on the plate, he picked it up, chewed it whole and swallowed it, and then spit out a bone that was as white as porcelain and bloodless.

After eating, he seemed even more nauseated.I kept looking at him, and when the boy was lying on the table and was about to vomit, he seemed to notice my gaze and looked up at me.

The moment when I looked at each other, I felt a little hard to adapt. Although this is a painter's dream, but right now people are swordsmen and I am fish and meat.But the young man seemed to have just woken up from a dream, and gradually recognized me.

The old man next to him was still talking, but his voice was blurred, and the surrounding scenery faded away.

The body of the young painter suddenly deformed at a speed visible to the naked eye. He lowered his head and took a breath almost choked up. His body burst like a drum, and there were frequent sounds of bone growth that made teeth sore, and then he vomited hysterically.

The painter stretched out his hand to feel for me, trembling and inhaling, feeling pain and cold, not knowing what he was looking for.

The old man has disappeared from the side, and the boats, attendants, floating corpses and banquet environment have completely disappeared.I tried to move my fingers, and found that I gradually gained control over my body.Sitting up, realize that the sea scene has been replaced, surrounded by lush weeds.

I was sitting in the wild grass, and the artist was sitting opposite me, with one hand resting on my elbow, convulsing all over my body, and almost vomited out my lungs.

I reached out and patted him on the back, trying to ease his nausea, and said, "Don't take it too seriously, it's just a hallucination. Everyone has nightmares, and it's over when you wake up."

In fact, my talking in the dream is very meaningless, and other words are to comfort the painter, it is better to say that I am talking to myself.The painter opened his drowsy and scarlet eyes, swallowed the sound of vomiting, and asked, "What about you? I heard that you are going abroad."

I was taken aback.

go abroad?Which one is going abroad?

I thought about it and said, "I don't want to chat with you for a while, I'll leave after chatting."

The dream is very stable, there is no sign of collapse.The painter stared blankly at the grass, with a somewhat defenseless expression, probably not knowing how to understand the current situation.After a while, he said to me, "Don't go."

The logic in the dream was not coherent, and the painter no longer had the urge to vomit.And I was taken aback.Judging from my previous sentence, this sentence "don't go" seems to be a response to me.I can't judge whether the painter can really communicate with me at this moment, and I didn't speak.

The painter rubbed his face vigorously with his hands, as if he suddenly remembered something and felt very tormented, and said, "I'm wrong about Lin Xiao, okay? I apologize to you. Don't leave."

Lin Xiao?

When this name appeared, I didn't feel it, nor did I have any vague impression, indicating that this person should have little influence on me.But listening to the artist, he seemed to feel that he owed me an explanation.

From the time I observed the painter, I always felt that he felt ashamed of me, and the current tone confirmed this point of view.But the painter's dream is extremely messy and deeply entangled with me, it's not just as simple as having a guilty conscience.Although this matter is not the most critical conflict between us, judging from the painter's words, it may not be the fuse.Perhaps because of this incident, I decided to go abroad, and the reason why I died may also be related to going abroad.

It took me a long time before I said to the painter, "It doesn't matter whether we go abroad or not, what matters is what we can do now." After a pause, I thought about my words and said, "If I say, I am a real existence. , is not an illusion, an illusion, what do you think?"

The painter looked at me, his eyes straightened again, as if he didn't understand what I meant.But the dream has been very stable, and there is no sign of waking up.

I said, "Maybe it doesn't make sense to do this, but I still hope you can remember what I said next. Let the past go, I don't care about it, and you don't care about it. Your mother will come later, You take a shower and go out with her to get more air. You are young, don't let the pain dominate your life, I am not and should not be your entangled nightmare. And..."

My eyes fell on the slender blades of grass by my feet. After a pause, I continued, "Also, we may not be much different in age. If my parents are still alive, I would like to ask you to pass me a message, telling them not to be too Miss me. I don’t feel bad, and I hope that the two elders can spend their old age steadily. You are the same, I can do so much, but I don’t want to see you slump like this, whether it’s because of me or not, do you understand?”

As soon as the words fell, cracks suddenly appeared in the grass centered on me, and the dream shook.

It was raining in the dream.

There was rain hitting his body, the raindrops were extremely large, almost every drop was the size of a stone, there was nowhere to hide, and his body trembled from the beating.The painter suddenly disappeared.Then he came from the rain and fog far away, the surrounding vegetation was dense and desolate, and I sat there unable to move.

I materialized again in my dream.

The painter stood in front of me without an umbrella. The two of us were baptized by meteorites in the grass. Our bodies seemed to be able to absorb water, and we were extremely heavy after being soaked.I can't move, the painter looks at me.

The painter knelt down straight in front of me as if his leg had been broken by the rain.Kusano's collapse became more serious with the kneeling position.

The painter's forehead was attached to mine, there was no temperature, it was extremely cold, and the meteorite rain hit me more violently, and the sky was so overcast that it appeared lavender.The painter's lips moved and trembled, and after a long time, he tore open his vocal cords with difficulty and silently, "That night, what did you want to say when you called me?"

I don't know which night the artist was referring to, but I felt breathless, and the overwhelming rain almost buried me.Consciousness cramps followed, and I vaguely saw headlights, unusually dazzling headlights, the upturned roof of the car, and blood dripping on my hands.The breath of death is almost close to the body.

I can't move, but I still have the ability to speak. My voice is also difficult. I said to the painter, "tell my parents, I'm fine, don't miss me too much. Also, people have to reconcile with the past. Even if I have a heart for fate I am unwilling, but rather than mourning deeply, I would rather be alive as if I had never lived." I swallowed a breath, only feeling that I was in the bottom of the sea, and the feeling of suffocation became stronger, and I said, "So, don't spend the rest of your life like this Remember me."

The painter's whole body was soaked and his face was covered with water. He listened to my words and started groping for me with only his hands, like a blind man touching a stone tablet.The painter touched something from my back, and his tone ranged between calm and crazy, like the dark cloudline before a storm, just waiting for an eruption peak.The painter said to me, "Man, everything that has been experienced will not disappear, it will only grow or rot where others can't see it. You are incomplete here, two lumbar vertebrae are missing, I have tasted it. It is not tasteless It’s like it didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean that you can forget it as rubbish if you spit it out. You said that people have to reconcile with the past, and only survivors have the right to choose whether they want to reconcile with the past. You are not a survivor, Xu Hao. You and Shao Chongming, Like grandma, she is bait in the sea, a corpse that cannot be supported, carrion that can still be talked about and swallowed after being soaked. Yes, everyone thinks so, I can reconcile with the past. I can be with your chest You can reconcile with your shattered skull, you can reconcile with the 17-year-old you, and you can reconcile with the 21-year-old you. But no one around told me that you are a person, a person who is not only People who live in the past."

The painter's left hand groped for my chest, where there were criss-crossing lines, and the words were still bloody engraved after being washed by the rain, which was an eternally vivid pain.The artist carved only six words: Tomb of Aizi Xu Hao.

The nails in my consciousness began to vibrate.

The painter hangs his head, the rain is pouring down on the ground, and the dream is so damaged that the outline of the ruins of the living room is faintly exposed in one corner.The TV screen lay quietly in the corner, flickering like needles.The ring on the painter's left hand burst into flames in the rain. He turned back and sat on the floor of the living room, while the grass was still under my feet, and the ship's cliff-like deck was beyond.

The painter was sitting opposite me, and the dream and reality became a puddle of water, which could no longer be clearly separated.He looked at me like in a bauhinia dream, as if he was waiting for me, but also as if he didn't know me.Then he rose, bare-bones, and staggered toward the cliff-like edge of the deck.

00: 03: 32

The TV in the corner of the living room is also pouring rain, some people are talking, some are flirting and whispering.

The living room doorbell rang, but no one answered, followed by a knock.

The painter walked to the edge of the deck and stretched out his hand to open the heavy curtains.The sunlight melted into the room in an instant, and the autumn colors were chilly, reflecting the entire wall white.

00: 02: 56

The TV screen started to run, the footsteps were low and hurried, and there was a deafening roar.

The painter stands by the window, on the cliff-like deck, he is very calm, as if in a negotiation, his back is crooked, only the flames of his index finger spread along the wall like crazy.The painter said, "Everyone is trying to persuade me to reconcile with the past. But this time it's you, Xu Hao. I'm not a survivor."

00: 01: 48

The knock on the door became more and more urgent, and the night of heavy rain in France was shown on TV.Running all the way in the rain, someone whispered like flirting.A man asks a woman, what if I say I love you?The woman said it was like lighting a candle in a bright room.

I opened my eyes in confusion, behind the deck, there was a golden light wheel, the sky on the 25th floor, and the sun on the 25th floor.At that moment, my consciousness was almost torn apart, the first time since existence, the pain was clearly pointed.

00: 00: 32

The painter straddled the window sill, his finger flames almost burning me.

00: 00: 22

I moved the first finger.

00: 00: 12

I grabbed the fire with the painter's index finger, my whole body was burning, my consciousness trembled in pain, and I roared almost angrily.

"Yan Ze!"

The painter's body trembled slightly.

Behind him, like a demon, I crawled out of the grass in the abyss, dripping with water and bursting with flames, so muddy that I could hardly be considered a human figure.I gasped and said to him, "Get the hell out of here."

The painter's index finger fire has been extinguished, and his feet are hanging outside the window.His calm eyes suddenly changed dramatically, his pupils trembled, and he looked at me in disbelief.Then it rolled off the ledge and fell in front of me.

00: 00: 10

I looked up at him, and the painter looked at me as well.Face to face, I saw myself in his eyes, hairless, with a swollen and ugly face, immersed in the fangs of fire, really like an evil ghost.But the painter was not afraid, he tried to touch me, his hand passed through me and the fire, and fell to the ground.

I saw a tear from the painter's eye falling in front of me, almost drowning me.

00: 00: 06

Someone broke in from the living room, I was the candle left in the painter's dream, they could only see the painter crouching in the messy ruins, how could they see me burning.

For the first time, I realized what dreams are. Dreams are an illusion of anomalous time, a deception made by the subconscious mind to win the desire to survive.

The painter's forehead hit the ground, the cold floor, and the boundaries of dreams became increasingly blurred.Someone wanted the painter to help him up, but the painter was crying on the floor like crazy.

I was about to burn out, and my voice was also weak, so I could only say to the painter, "If your memory can form a world, then I will live forever in this world. Live, Yan Ze, death is not the end, there is always a place for us See you later."

00: 00: 01

When consciousness faded, I heard a voice next to my ear, almost crying.

He said, Xu Hao, call me.

take me away.

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The movie lines are from "Days on the Clouds"