Picture◎Ni Shao

◎Chen Xinrong Picture◎Ni Shao

Toward the end of winter I started forcing myself to take long walks. It was my seventh month as an exchange student in Europe. I had just finished a trip and had spent half of my living expenses at the beginning of the month. I couldn’t travel too far before the next trip. The weather was unusually sunny the week after our trip, which gave us the illusion of spring. Sitting in a room seems very wasteful. I usually think I’d better go around the lake today. I actually don’t know what to see when I’m at the lake, so I come back again and again just to finish it. I haven’t been successful, at least not yet. I went out too late and had to turn back after less than half a circle.

There are not many people in the Lake before spring, and they are wrapped in down jackets, walking with their dogs or walking side by side with another person. I occasionally pass each other with them, or we always maintain a distance and keep parallel to each other, each keeping his own quiet. There are no fences or asphalt roads, and the route is just mud. Departing from the main road and approaching the shore, you can hear the lake water sloshing and breaking, transparently covered with silver sand and gravel. The sound is intertwined with the chirping of water birds (gently jumping high notes), the falling of dead branches, miscanthus and miscanthus. Touching each other delicately.

Please read on…

The water surface is very quiet, trembling like silk satin, flowing into the distance one by one, as if there is no end.

It was mid-afternoon. The slanting light of the afternoon sliced ​​the scenery frame by frame, each moment was subtle and new. Maybe it was for that kind of light that I forced myself to go out with my camera on my back. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the sun was still at an angle of 75 degrees. It was pouring on the lake beside me like milk. It was not easy to photograph. The sky was overexposed and the outlines of things were too sharp. The camera was turned on and off, the lens extended and retracted. I covered my forehead with my palms and squinted my eyes, trying to see clearly as if trying to fight against something.

It seems like a waste if you don’t look at it. A little voice said in my heart. We have come so far.

Too much light makes everything blind. You can vaguely recognize that you are stepping on a beach. There are rows of wooden benches on the beach. People are sitting or lying here and there, facing the sun, sleeping dryly in their down jackets. Lots of dogs (Hundstrand, this area is indeed labeled as such), including spaniels, terriers, large dogs with slender limbs like deer, wolfhounds and Dobermans, some on leashes and some without, overexposed brightly There are children running, bouncing, and throwing up the fine sand on the beach; there are also children squatting on the wet sand to dig holes or building walls, and waterbirds dipping their toes in the lake and staring quietly into the distance.

Under such abundant sunshine, everything seemed unusually silent and beautiful, bright and clear, so beautiful that it was overwhelming. I subconsciously turned around to avoid it.

I felt a little safer with my back to the sun. Just like a cloudy day, a cloudy day allows people to stay in the room without any sense of guilt. There are no beautiful things hanging outside the window to be wasted and wasted bit by bit. But I’m not the kind of person who likes to live in my own cave: I just don’t know why on those rare days when the weather is bright, I feel very, very tired.

The weather in Europe is either cloudy (the sky is compacted and sealed like a wall) or there is no cloud at all, a kind of high-latitude blue. Shrouded in that flawless color, the world looks fake.

I don’t know why I think of the optometry room I frequented in my childhood: my forehead and chin pressed against the gasket, one eye looking through the hole in the machine, the white railings and green fields on both sides of the road, and the hot air balloon and blue sky at the end. My myopia started very early, in the first grade of elementary school. Wrong use of eyes and poor sitting posture are probably the most important factors hereditary. The corrective solution at that time was mydriasis. The side effect of the medicine was photophobia. Therefore, when I was young, I didn’t like other children like outdoor activities. Whenever I went out, I had to wear a pair of sunglasses. It was very ugly. What photos to download. However, the prescription quickly increased to a number that could not be saved by medicine. Soon after, I went straight to get a pair of glasses. The side effects are gone, but the degree and photophobia have irrevocably grown into the body.

The inconvenience of glasses is not a problem for me. The biggest disadvantage is that I don’t know what I look like until very late. In fact, it is very reasonable. This face has been occupied by glasses for a long time. In the rare moments such as washing your face or sleeping, if you want to see yourself clearly, you must get very close to the mirror, very close, so close that you can almost see the face opposite. Stick together. From this distance, only part of the face can be vaguely discerned, including the tip of the nose, peeling lips, and flat single eyelids. Once when I was looking in the mirror, I suddenly realized this: I will never have a face as complete and clear as others in my life, and I started crying in a daze.

Things weren’t as bad as I thought. Before graduating from elementary school, my parents were really frightened by the Eight Baidu, and they had no choice but to spend money to order orthokeratology tablets. The principle of this kind of hard contact lens is that when worn at night, the cornea with abnormal curvature due to myopia is pressed back to its normal shape. Although the cornea will slowly rebound during the day, long-term wear can maintain clear vision all day long. Not a problem. It’s strange, like a kind of frozen magic that prevents decay, especially when I finally see my face clearly like a new face, a faint hope for the future arises in my heart.

In normal cases, the cornea will harden in adulthood and become difficult to correct with lenses, but this did not happen to me. According to the doctor, this is unusual (he may also have used the word lucky), which means that the clarity seen so far is a fluke, and lens failure will always occur at some point in the future.

Let’s talk about it then. The doctor said. It’s not too difficult to laser off or something.

But I can’t seem to be convinced like this. I always feel that the world that can be seen and grasped without any obstacles has long been taken away. The present moment we have, including the face in the mirror, is something temporarily borrowed and can be confiscated at any time.

How long can such a world last?

I lifted my feet that were starting to sink into the sand. After standing on this beach for too long, the warmth from the outside has soaked into my shoes. Squinting his eyes, he tried to make out the unfamiliar and dazzling scenery around him. I still have an afternoon to explore the lake.

The room I stayed in in Germany was very white. White walls, table tops, wardrobes, heaters, bed frames, and window frames. Fully furnished, no curtains. But September daylight comes on before seven o’clock, and I usually wake up with the feeling of my exposed body, like a desperate snail.

Reminds me of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my home room. The seaside town is subject to strong, sandy winds all year round. Just opening the window a small crack will coat the entire room with a layer of dust. The direct sunlight in summer collects all the heat in the room, and there are always cockroaches at night. Climb along the gap. When I was a child, my father pointed to the floor-to-ceiling windows in those blockbuster movies and said that this is how foreigners build their houses. My father was very upset that he had not designed the house with lower ceilings, like those apartment scenes in American TV series.

When I was a kid, there was a punishment in school called staring into the distance, which actually meant standing in front of the window. But staring at the green scenery outside can protect your eyes and calm your mind, which is really cost-effective. Maybe my eyesight is so bad because I don’t stare too much into the distance. Once I realized this, as if I wanted to make up for it, I looked out of my floor-to-ceiling window whenever I had free time. Grey-green hills, taro paddy fields, wind turbines, iron sheets factories, sand and gravel fields and robotic arms. When the weather in the town is bad, the sound of the wind will make people feel very desperate, as if the world will never get better again. Looking into the dusty and slapping scenery, I believe that one day I will go blind like this for no apparent reason, a kind of A lingering premonition.

I don’t know how other people deal with their myopia: I don’t know why they feel it doesn’t matter. The crystal is irreversibly deformed, and the world is collapsing day by day: turmoil, war, hotter and hotter weather, extinct species, and an expanding planet. Technology gives us the illusion that something is being saved, yet decay is merely masked and continues to occur. Maybe that’s not the case or maybe I’m too pessimistic. Maybe it’s because I haven’t fired off the degree laser yet.

Maybe I heard too much about the wind in the small town. If you have the ability, you should go further. Run away. said my father.

Halfway around the lake, I began to wonder why I chose to go out on such a bright afternoon. It might just be a new habit that I had imitated. For example, sunbathing and picnicking seemed to have become popular on the island. The sun was indeed warm on my back, but the warmth had nothing to do with the sweat and heat. It made me feel weird–I still couldn’t let go of the old body feeling. Although I have forgotten a little bit about summer and what it feels like when the familiar moist heat of the island is applied to my body. And even in very cold weather, I am still used to standing in the shadows, just like when I was a child facing the brilliant outdoors, my photophobia habit could place a small amount of coolness.

Thinking in the shadow, I don’t want to go out again.

Later, we still didn’t finish circling the lake. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the sky was almost completely dark, so I left the coordinates on the map angrily like the previous times, and turned back along the shade of the fallen trees. I was the only one on the whole road. The only thing worth noting was that there was a person shaking a hula hoop by the lake, and a horse and its rider approaching and moving away from each other. I looked at the end where the horse’s hoof disappeared. The angle and brightness of the twilight fell just right. Golden Hour is the best time for taking photos. Going back to Hundstrand, the dogs and the playful children have dispersed a lot. The scattered water on the lake looks like the sky has been torn into corners and fed to the birds. The perfect brightness is the leftover sunset.

I turned on the camera and found that the memory card had room for five pictures. I took four pictures and then the battery died. I checked my pocket and realized I forgot to bring a spare battery. never mind. I think. Not being able to capture this moment makes me feel like a waste again. We have come so far.

Will I come to Europe again in the future? The winter here is too cold, too tiring, and too difficult. On the other end of the video call, I tried my best to complain, but at the same time I felt guilty: the end of the one-year exchange does not mean that I will not return, I just can’t trust anyone to leave. Leaving always makes you unsure whether the place you can go back to is still there.

Facing the vast lake view, I stood on the afternoon sand, covering my forehead with my palms, turned around, and realized that even in such a cold country, I still hate the feeling of the sun on my face.

And during those phone calls, I could never describe this thought: In this foreign country, under a rare and warm sunny day, the cloudless sky has a high-latitude blue, everything is neat, clean, and quiet, and everything is soaked in sunlight. It was scorching white and hazy; the road in the distance unfolded towards me in a friendly way, and the sun of the world was warm on my spine. But I looked at the unusually clear shadows under my feet, and I didn’t know why I just felt very miserable.

The weather will eventually warm up. I heard that in summer like that, the sky doesn’t get completely dark until ten o’clock in the evening. Almost eternal sunshine: the room is as bright as burning, and the white wall opposite is hung with my own shadow that cannot be dispersed. They say you should go out for a walk more often when the weather is nice.

Then summer really came. In the summer I finally made some friends and went to the lake with P. P grew up in a country with many lakes. I have never been in any open water. Less than ten meters from the shore, I could no longer step on the bottom. The cold lake water reached my chin. For the first time, I felt the panic that I knew I was really going to die. Inhaling desperately and struggling, the soles of my feet experienced stiffness, pain and cramps. P on the side pulled me up.

I think my problem is actually not that I can’t reach the bottom. Floating in the lake, I trembled and told P in German. It’s because I wore a frog goggle every time I went into the water. Seeing the bottom of the water clearly makes me feel more at ease. I practiced opening my eyes in the water, but it was very painful. The pain made me panic and fall further.

P shook his head and said, it was very dark in the water anyway, so he couldn’t actually see anything.

How do you know how far you have swam? I asked.

Just close your eyes and keep swimming forward. When you get tired, turn back on your own and you will eventually reach the shore. P said.

But it still sounds too comfortable, such a European answer. There is no need to worry about the dangers of tides and big waves, the weather that suddenly becomes cold and windy, and there is no need to worry about the threat from the sea and the other side of the sea. It is easy to stay calm in the good enough weather, light and stable.

I floated up, amazed at how easy it all was. Facing the light still makes people feel that there is no way to escape, but it is necessary to practice a posture of endurance in order not to sink. I feel that my eyelashes are covered with hot light, and the sky is still like March, without a single cloud. From this angle, the world looks so flat and even, so flawless it makes me want to cry.

Close your eyes, and in this moment of extremely fragile exposure, find the last piece of darkness in this light. Hide inside. A gesture of resistance. I don’t know how long it took and how far it drifted from the shore.

What is it that we are ultimately resisting? I have no idea. I have no idea. ●

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