Ashes on Manuscript Paper

Zhou Yantian's life has been like the words on his manuscript paper - scrawled, poor, but with a stubbornness that refuses to fade. As an old writer who had not published a few decent works, he kept a tin box of unpublished manuscripts and counted the days in an old building that was about to be demolished. The walls were peeling off, the rent was in arrears, and the coughs were more frequent than the sound of the tip of a pen crossing the page. But when he couldn't breathe, he would take out the manuscripts stained with soy sauce and stuffed with dried radish leaves - those were the words he wrote bit by bit from the days of hunger and the back of his mother picking up garbage. He is afraid. I am afraid that I will disappear quietly like the peeling wall in the building. I am afraid that those manuscripts that hide the warmth and warmth of a lifetime will eventually be bundled into a pile by the scrap collector and weighed by the pound. So he took the tin box and quietly buried these "worthless" words in the corner of the old bookshelf in the community activity room, under the crooked compositions of primary school students. The old building was demolished, and bulldozers rolled over the corner where he lived, but those manuscripts stained with traces of life were on some unknown bookshelf, waiting to be read by someone who accidentally opened them: It turned out that there was a writer who had been poor all his life and wrote all his weight into the light pages. This is not an answer about "what to leave behind", but a footnote about "how to live" - ​​when life is as light as a feather, those carefully written words may be the last weight against forgetfulness.