My index fingers are like a pair of pincers caught on the edges of my phone. Sometimes one of them bends a little bit, adjusting the angle of the screen in a blunt white. My eyes, fixated by the words shown and deleted there, move as my thumbs type on a projected keyboard. Everything that is not the screen is dark and peripheral, even my fingers and hands appear only as silhouettes. On the thousandth night nothing still interests me on the screen. There are just a bunch of letters on a yellowish background and chronically cute lumps of colors. At 12:00 AM instead of sleeping I am looking at my phone and my tireless obsession with it. This is the sixth iPhone 6 Plus for me and the tenth phone in general, yet the urgency to immerse is so painstakingly fresh - what clever cursors, images and gestures, and the way they are subordinated - a feeling nowhere else to be felt - no more card drawings and running-out-of-tissue-in-a-public-toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments, it ensures to kindly remind you of low battery and that the apps will function optimally. 100% satisfaction guaranteed with refund, no one says no to anyone anymore.
The mattress cover was a bit wet; the dryer downstairs mustn't have handled it well. I wrap my legs with a corner of the quill, dried, and continue to look at my phone - Google Plus, hmm, too beautiful; LinkedIn, just Facebook in suit; Reddit, too niddering in taste; WeChat and Quora and Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock, all of them are confined in tiny, rounded squares for my ultimate pick. And I, pampered by their butt-shaking eagerness, suddenly decide all of them disgusting and instead open the Notes app to jot down a few thoughts, non-thoughts to be precise, words and lines to make up space rather than content and which I quickly delete.
Two days after Mid-Autumn Festival the kitchen behind the wall to the right of me still lingers the buzzing noises and the bursting laughters of a group of my compatriots that I unexpectedly come to despise. Their leftover dishes in the sink contrast ever greatly with their domineering heads flinched behind pairs of glasses, coddled in a persistently mild smile - concubines made of palace. But I ain't got anything to do with them anymore. Perhaps in them there was certain sensitivity that I failed to foresee - albeit their produce is neither ingenious nor outlandish they do, however, retain a particular finesse to cast the superficial as the supercilious - going to singsongs and buying Coca-Cola - dreams come true when they are not even looking. You play, you pay, you bastard.
Even if I sleep now, since I am already quite sleepy, waking up tomorrow will be a hard reset of the insights that I have garnered today. The bitter nostalgia that I taste in dream is my heroin. My rationality denies it; my reality refutes it; and I keep going back to it, because my subconscious mind keeps going back to it, and I keep going back to sleep. Thus I would rather stay somnolent here on this seat that hardly bristles me than to become lucid in dream - I would prefer to keep the pieces together than to scatter them in wind; I keep remembering for it once was. But such foolhardy nonsense! Such foolhardy nonsense indeed!
Intending to preserve, I have reduced myself. If two months ago I strived, now I merely endeavor; if two months ago I loved, now I like; if two months ago I had faith not to be sought from religion but from real world, now I see faith as lordly as to be nearly a contrivance. With such reduction I am much more anchored. Instead of fluctuating from ecstasy to despair, I hover around delight to dismay. I used to see obstinacy as something to be upheld. I now doubt it - solipsism dragged me out of turbidity, but it can only go so far. The rest to me is only vacancy, resembling what I thought was life's monotony, which I had smashed, for then I was a gambler, a daredevil and a pagan.
I no longer am.
