45 in the Forties

On the night of his forty-fifth birthday, Chen Yanqing sat alone in the parking lot until early morning. The screen of his mobile phone lit up with three unread messages - his wife reminded him to buy antihypertensive medicine, his son sent him a cram school payment link, and the company informed him that he had been unsuccessful in the competition. The man in the rearview mirror had eyes as cloudy as overnight tea. Xu Zhiwei turned to the reading notes from twenty years ago in his lesson preparation notes. The words "become an extraordinary person" on the page have been blurred by time. Her longest "creation" now is a communication template written to different parents every week. This novel is not about a miraculous comeback. It only records how an ordinary middle-aged man struggled under the water and discovered that the so-called "crisis" was just the appearance of finally daring to look directly at life itself. When Chen Yanqing accidentally walked into a second-hand bookstore that was about to close down, and when Xu Zhiwei read "My mother's eyes will snow" in a student composition, something hard began to crack silently. From "How should I live" to "I am still alive", they have walked this road for forty-five years. The mortgage payment was still there and gray hair was increasing, but one ordinary morning, the two of them unexpectedly bought each other's favorite sweet-scented osmanthus cake at the morning market. There was no special reason, but they suddenly remembered the sweet fragrance in the autumn breeze when they first met at the age of eighteen. Half a million words can't be filled with fireworks in the world. But it is enough to make it clear: a place with friendly lights is the way home.