13 On the Night before My 21st Birthday

On the Night before My 21st Birthday

In just one hour, you will be turning 22.

On the night before your 22nd birthday, you feel an unprecedented loneliness and desperately want someone to talk to, so you write many words to please yourself.

You send messages to four people, with the same content. One and a half hours later, your sister replies. She is doing an internship in Qingdao. Two hours later, another classmate replies, but you only exchange a few sentences with both of them. The other two still haven't replied until now. The more lonely you feel, the more you want to talk, so you develop a liking for listening to others.

Everyone has their own circles, and you are afraid of being lonely, so you try your best to squeeze into their circles. You manage to enter, but slowly realize that this circle is outdated and everyone has moved on, yet you can't bear to let it go and also want to enter other circles. As a result, you find yourself in a place where you have no connection to any circles, feeling utterly alone and confused.

Growing up, apart from watching movies when they were shown in the village, you have only been to the cinema once. It was the first time, and you slept through a lot of the movie, missing many plot points. When you walked out of the cinema, you cautiously followed them, fearing to leave their circle and appearing pitiful. So you left their circle and ended up with no one to pity you. You wandered around the shopping mall with them, feeling like Liu Laolao in the Great Garden, as if you had come to another world. Your heart was filled with sadness, not for yourself, but from deep within, feeling that you should not have come to this kind of place. Since then, you have never been to such a place again.

Your sister tells you that she is doing an internship in Qingdao and will bring her boyfriend home. That's it. You want to say more, but you don't know where to start. Since she got a boyfriend again, you have been in less and less contact, hardly talking to her anymore. You say their life is too peaceful, and you don't want to disturb it. So you never reach out. Initiating a conversation doesn't necessarily mean there will be a response.

There is only half an hour left now.

You have never had a concept of relationships. You don't care, so you have no memories. Your mother predicted your marriage when you were 19 years old, but it would affect your studies, so that year no one liked you and you started to have concerns. Therefore, your mother has been unhappy, saying that you lost a hundred points on the college entrance exam. You kneeled in front of your mother, that was a summer.

So in those years, no matter who liked you, you had no reaction. Even if you heard that someone liked you, you would just feel a little excited at the time. You didn't understand how to cherish, so you never missed anyone. On your birthday that year, you got drunk for the first time. She hung the gift on the door but didn't come in. You fell asleep in bed while drunk and didn't get up. You studied together for thirteen years, and she liked you for at least seven years, but you had no reaction, not even a hint of guilt. That summer, she pursued you for a long time, but six years later, she said nothing happened. Clearly, she knew she liked you, but you were unmoved, so she pretended to be ignorant. As a result, time does not look back, and you are already old. When you were nineteen, it seemed like many people liked you, but in the end, no one did, and your marriage did not change. After graduation, your mother told you that there was a girl in high school who would always copy your homework. So saying it was just as good as not saying it.

She replies to your message at school, saying three sentences with fifteen words and two punctuation marks, without any emotions. You don't know why you messaged her, but you don't care, you just want someone to talk to.

Walking on the way back home, the night breeze is cool. Suddenly, you want to cry. When you want to talk the most, there isn't even a dog by your side. You turn on the music, as usual, as if someone is talking to you. You hum along with off-key songs as a response.

The third person replies to your message in sixteen minutes, but you're awake and don't reply to her. You want her to go to sleep early and wish her good night.

Actually, you have always felt sorry for them. You feel like you have abandoned them in another world, pitying them. But now there are only four minutes left.

A friend a few years younger than you is attending a tutoring class and always finds time to chat with you. You really want her to wish you a happy birthday. So you tell her to go to sleep, and you spend an hour talking on your computer.

Until now, in your life, you have only met one person who made you different from usual.

So, time is up, you are 22 now. I wish you...

00:07, you are glad that you still have a brother who remembers you after ten years.

July 17, 2015.

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