When Zhuang Mengdie was seven years old, her nervous system cracked due to an overload collapse.
Life was so heavy that it broke the string - a seven-year-old child could understand his mother's last look before she fell from the building, but he could not bear the weight of such a heavy scene. So the other half grew out of the crack, cried for him, hurt for him, and buried his face in the darkness for him so that he could still turn his eyes to the light.
The man's name is Papillon, he speaks English, and he lives in the mirror. He is his oldest friend in the world and his longest relationship in this world.
Twenty years later, Zhuang Mengdie is a Chinese-American writer in Los Angeles. His daily functions are intact, but he can't make eye contact with others. He looked at the reader's third button, at the pothos behind the psychiatrist, at anything that wouldn't look back at him. At night, he and Papillon wrote alternately in the document, like throwing a ball across a mirror, or like two people sharing a pair of ribs, counting each other's breaths in the dark.
Until my twenty-seventh birthday, someone at the book signing asked me in public: "You always write about your mother in your books. How did she die?"
The system is overloaded. The mirror shattered. He finally looked at Papillon in the fragments - the first time in twenty years that he had "looked at a human being", if the word "human" could include the reflection in the mirror.
Therapy, New York, Iceland. Mother's sonnets, lockers in Grand Central Station, stones on the black sand beach that heat up before the heart. Step by step, he walked into Papillon's territory, and step by step he walked back to the seven-year-old who was locked in the closet.
It turns out Papillon wasn't here to save him. It was to force him to save himself.
"I don't answer questions that have only one answer." Papillon wrote in his final poem, "Cuteness is too heavy. You have held two people in the same rib for too long. The ribs are cracking. I hear it."
This is not goodbye. It's handover.
When Zhuang Mengdie finally stood in front of the crowd and looked directly into their eyes, there was no one in the mirror. But he knew that Papillon was there - not in the reflection, in the courage, in the tear that was twenty years late, in the butterfly in Zhuang Sheng's dream that finally didn't have to ask who the butterfly was.
Concept: Zhuang Shengxiao dreams of butterflies