With You as Usual

Some people appear not to participate in the rest of your life, but to make you convinced for a moment that someone has seen you, which is already good. --- Bai Mulian is a documentary photographer who only claps his hands. He has a rule that he has told himself for seven years: don't slap your face, only clap your hands. Because faces lie, hands don't. He photographed the fingers that were picking up photos in the ruins, the joints that clenched the sheets in the hospice ward, and the palms that were red from the cold in the market in the early morning. He uses a viewfinder to keep a safe distance from the world, and his mantra is "I am only responsible for recording, not intervening." Until he saw a pair of hands in the lens of the hospice ward. The hands folded the towel into a straight square, avoiding the mole on the old man's earlobe. The owner of those hands is Su Qian. Su Qian is a volunteer in the hospice ward, a girl who always smiles first and can remember all the trivial wishes of the elderly. She was carrying a washed white cloth bag, which contained an old version of "Three Hundred Tang Poems", mung bean cake, reading glasses, and a secret that no one knew - her father was a vegetative state. A person who uses the camera to avoid intervention meets a person who uses lies to maintain kindness. They recognized each other in the background of death: he saw her eyelids drooping rapidly after smiling. It was a micro-expression that he was very familiar with, a micro-expression that quickly healed on the edge of collapse. She noticed that he always turned the rim of the glass halfway before drinking water, as if to mark a safe boundary that no one could enter. They are the same kind. Two beasts injured in the storm recognized each other in the darkness by virtue of their similar auras.