Now I sit on my routine wooden chair in front of the desk that faces the window; different objects are scattered around the desk with the same randomness as one year ago - only now the curtain is closed and I'm not interested in reopening it, for such an act requires me seeing it as worthwhile, and no, it is not worthwhile. A new shopping mall was erected in front of my apartment building where I lashed myself to move forward, and the road and the street lamps and the cars are all veiled visually, with occasional bursts of sound reminding me of their past, and putting me into reminiscence.
Only recently, have I realized that the depression I once pridefully thought I have is not depression at all, it is mere discomfort, a mild ailment that is not debilitating, upon which no one genuinely suffers, and about which no one eventually cares. Now my thoughts are plastered, my body congealed, I type on the keyboard - the plate of grapefruit and pear slices to the left of my laptop does not arouse me, and nothing arouses me to the extent that typing the act itself is the straw I agonize myself to grasp. More than that, the start-up that I will set up next semester, the unfulfilled duty to my students, and the pills which I take to make myself cosmetically tolerable, I do these things no longer out of a diminutive but nevertheless operant aspiration, but out of an automation, out of them as prerequisites of my continued existence - this is depression, a depression so bizarre that I'm willing - I still have the SSRIs and benzodiazepines, and they are readily in the drawer within the reach of my right arm, and I do not want to take them, even the temptation of doing so is avoided like a plague. For it is in reality that I corporally pass by, and it is in dream that I dwell in the past.
What is still agreeable though, is that the world is still revolving around me. The young man from Jiangxi is still working at his barbecue stand, from 11 PM to 4 or 5 AM in the morning, depending on whether there are customers, not knowing that I will not be one of them; the Shanghainese old lady is still washing her dishes in her windowless apartment, and her husband is still watching television - they know that the crying baby living next door will never return, and they offer a hug and proceed with their own mundane matter. Everyone is still having their lives, happy or bitter, sometimes either, sometimes both. None seems affected, in the same way that none will seem affected if I die instantly - they might try to talk you out of it, they might hug you, they might grieve for a moment, and they walk on. Why the hell can't I do it? I indeed can. Indeed there is nothing in this world that cannot be foregone, the sole distinguisher being its value - the happiness in the past one year, or the happiness in the future, just that I ain't so sure; and I refuse to be.
Henry Miller once said, the best way to forget about a woman is to turn her into literature. But for me, she is always quite the opposite of literature, and if anything, what that literature requires is a form of detachment that I could never attain, for in it there inevitably shall be traces of her. My usual contempt for things loses its potency. And if, in the future I managed to get over it, no matter how earnest I will have become, and how righteous the reasons I will have used, that future, will seem to me, at this precise moment, on this precise day, an utter deviation of my worth that I consider to be the most applaudable, a vicious and ever sickening betrayal. (P: June 29, 2017 - I felt neither righteous nor earnest, only a sort of inevitable oblivion, inkstain washed away; Mar 27, 2021 - no, she has never been washed away.)
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It is with the greatest self-constraint that I did not delete any blog post from the past one year. Whenever I read them, I watch what was once part of me turning into a folly satire, a satire so close to being a real-life romance that every time I think of it, I chuckle with regret and weep with delight.
