From Loneliness to Old Age

"The screen window of my old house had a hole, and the wind always mixed the smell of my father's medicine and my grandma's pickled vegetables downstairs. Zhou Tao always laughed at me for living like a precision instrument: leaving the house at 7:20, arriving at the company at 8:00, picking up the nurse's shift at 5:30 - until that day he snatched my cell phone, stared at the "unknown caller" in the address book and raised his eyebrows: 'Lao Du, isn't it the Bai Yueguang from your junior high school who is looking for you?' He was half right. Lin Wan did come to see me, but not to renew an old relationship. She sent a cassette tape, which contained a recording of her primary school in Yunnan: 'Today a child said that his father always hid in the toilet late at night and cried, very much like Brother Du Wen back then...' It turns out that the scars that I thought were well hidden had been quietly sewn into a map by her over twenty years. From the twenty unsigned postcards she sent after she transferred to another school, to the drawers that I automatically filled every time I worked overtime (I later found out that Aunt Chen secretly put them there), to the sudden extra allowance for caregivers when my father was hospitalized - All the 'coincidences' I thought were her unspoken 'I am'. And when I held the last thing she sent (it was actually the school badge I lost in junior high school), I finally cried out in the corridor of the hospital—— It turns out that the loneliest thing is never alone, but when you think you deserve to be alone. Now, I want to take her 'map' and find myself who dares to say 'I need'. "