Lin Song felt as if his sky had caved in.
Ordinarily, almost no one worries that the sky might one day collapse. Everyone understands that in this world, there are always people taller than themselves who will be the first to prop up that falling sky. On a leisurely holiday, lying on the park grass and gazing up at the sky, the wind is gentle, the sun is beautiful, and the sky has not caved in. All fantasies are of a boundlessly wonderful future: a job with more income, a bigger house, a more comfortable vacation.
In truth, expecting others to fend off the trouble of a collapsing sky is just a delusion for idle chatter. Everyone has a sky that belongs only to them.
This independent sky hangs merely above one’s own head, and it has nothing to do with anyone else. If one day your own sky collapses, you can only be the one to hold it up with your head. This collapsing sky will not land on anyone else’s feet. Whether your own sky is dark with rain and thunder, it doesn’t in the slightest affect someone else’s, which may be clear and sunny.
There is a kind of suffering called destiny. As long as one is human, one cannot escape the various troubles brought by the Creator. These troubles are not distributed equally to the world; they are merely shared, more or less, among everyone.
Lin Song brought a not-so-small trouble with him right from his mother’s womb. For decades, he lived peacefully, without incident. Then one day, pain ambushed him without warning, like incessant waves crashing against the reefs on the shore, one surge after another, a relentless, agonizing pain that lasted all night.
In the hospital ward, moans of pain were commonplace.
A beautiful young woman was hooked up to one bottle of glucose solution after another. Her pale face, washed out by the anti-inflammatory drugs, looked even more translucent. The boy accompanying her had bleached-yellow hair pulled back in a thick ponytail. Before the doctor came to check on her, the boy was already slumped over her hospital bed, fast asleep.
A ninety-three-year-old gentleman had been living in the hospital’s nursing ward for nearly six months; he was a long-retired cadre. It seemed that this time, only surgery could alleviate his trouble. The pre-operative preparations caused him considerable suffering, so much so that his stubbornness had finally surrendered to the torment of the punctures. In a half-conscious state, he constantly cursed the people who had set these confinements upon him.
When Lin Song was wheeled into the operating room, he felt the blanket covering him was warm and clean. An unknown, soothing light music played, faint and gentle, barely there. The shadowless surgical lamp hanging overhead wasn’t even glaring, though it shone directly into his eyes.
The nurses methodically prepared, paying no attention to Lin Song, who was lying on the operating table. They chatted with each other about matters that seemed trivial and unrelated to the surgery. Lin Song just lay there quietly, listening to their chatter, until the anesthetic was injected into his body.
It was four hours later when Lin Song was gently shaken awake by a nurse. Lying in the recovery bed, he began to wonder: where was his pain supposed to be? This calculation left him slightly disappointed; he couldn’t actually locate the source of the pain. It was only when he was being moved back to his ward that Lin Song realized his weakened body was completely different from before. He was wrapped tightly in bandages, and a pain-relief pump slowly released its anesthetic effects. Every slow, tiny movement to sit up would sear the nerves pulled by the incision. This would be the great trouble he had to face from now on.
In the face of pure, physical pain, even the strongest willpower is not worth mentioning.
The hallucinations induced by the anesthetic made it impossible for Lin Song to sleep peacefully. His consciousness, catalyzed by the drug, was forced to roam, soaring through clouds and mist. No matter where his hallucinations wandered, they constantly highlighted his “trouble”: He was always trekking through a boundless desert, his mouth parched, yet all he could touch was the endless yellow sand. Lin Song knew this was his own hallucination; he had never in his life set foot on the edge of a desert. But he was utterly unable to break free. He tried to jolt himself awake, to slap his own shoulder, but nothing worked. He remained in this muddled, hallucinatory state, his body tasting the torment of being swallowed by a swamp.
Finally, when the rays of the setting sun pierced through the window and stung Lin Song’s eyes, giving him a chance to escape his predicament, he immediately pressed the call bell by his bed and asked the nurse to pull the needle of the pain pump from his arm.
Just like that, Lin Song experienced the ultimate devastation, from the physical to the spiritual. He secretly reckoned that the road ahead, perhaps, could be no worse than this.
As a young child, Lin Song presented as a weak and timid boy. In the neighborhood of Jingwu Road, a timid child was inevitably looked down upon and, inevitably, the most frequently bullied.
He remembered one time when the teacher instructed him to go to the home of a student who was repeating the grade, to tell the student’s parents to come to the school. The “repeater” blocked Lin Song’s path home, forbidding him from going to his house. Lin Song stubbornly insisted on completing the task. The repeater flew into a rage. He grabbed Lin Song’s schoolbag strap, and with the momentum, slapped Lin Song across the face. Lin Song could only stand under a utility pole by the roadside, clutching his burning, swelling cheek, and cry.
No one came to comfort him. On Jingwu Road, who hadn’t been slapped a few times? The survival code for the kids on this street was: if you can win the fight, beat them half to death; if you can’t win, turn tail and run for your life. No one would be like Lin Song, just standing there taking the hit. The labyrinthine alleys were the escape routes for the clever kids.
As he grew older, Lin Song’s height shot up. His seat in the classroom moved from the second row all the way to the back, until he was nailed to the last row of his group. Compared to his past humiliation, Lin Song’s role on the streets changed from “being bullied” to “not daring to be bullied.”
One time, he was out with his cousin when a passerby on a bicycle scraped against his cousin’s motorcycle, nearly throwing Lin Song from the back seat. His cousin immediately stopped the bike, grabbed the guy who had fallen, and gave him a reckless beating. His cousin had practiced a few years of rough martial arts and was quick with his hands. Passersby rushed up to intervene. Having vented his anger, the cousin put Lin Song back on the motorcycle and sped away.
Later, Lin Song also tried to swing his fist, intending to bloody the nose of a classmate a head shorter than him. But every time he was about to strike, some “well-meaning” person would step in to stop him. Lin Song, too, would always sensibly lower his raised fist. Just by flashing a ferocious grimace, he could resolve the conflict he was facing.
His father often nagged, “Don’t be so aggressive. It’s not worth it to get into trouble. Life is long. Don’t let the scar heal and forget the pain.”
Later, Lin Song pondered this for a long time. “The scar heals, the pain is forgotten”—what kind of scar “fully heals”? If you accidentally cut your finger while peeling an apple, you put on a Band-Aid. In less than a week, the wound heals, perhaps without even leaving a scar. Sometime later, to force your brain to remember that injury every time you peel an apple is completely impossible. The healed scar and the superficial pain have long been placed by memory into the most inaccessible storage area.
However, if you have surgical scars that were stitched by a doctor, these marks will be branded on the skin for a lifetime. Lin Song doesn’t need to deliberately remember the surgery he had as a child, of which he has no memory. Every time he showers, as soon as his hand touches that gnarled scar tissue, he remembers. For him, it is a real experience of confronting the void.
A healed scar will, of course, forget the pain it once caused. But those scars etched onto the body that will never disappear are like permanent magnets. As long as they are awakened, that deep, deep pain will flood back like a spring.