After the epidemic, I often feel that I don't want to control the world anymore. Love is what I want most

Writing this long journal is mainly for self-healing. It helps me deal with the backlog of emotions in the past two years, record the important moments to me, and try to form a positive narrative. I started writing at the end of last year, but it was difficult because I was often overwhelmed by emotions as soon as I wrote, and then it was difficult to face them. I keep forcing myself to pick it up and continue writing, but I keep avoiding it, preferring to just let it go.

The pandemic has brought great trauma to many people, and because of this, we temporarily lose the language and capacity to discuss it. As a public matter, it does not promote social reflection and progress, but its impact on individuals is equally difficult to address. For the latter, we all have a lot of homework to do in private.

I believe everyone has their own way of coping with trauma. It's just that I found that my powerlessness in expression can only be broken through by expression.

Trigger Warning: Depression, death, and hallucinations are depicted in the article

i will always think of death

I would think about death all the time, and I couldn't help myself.

My family lives on the 17th floor, which is actually a rare high-rise apartment in this city. I chose this one-bedroom apartment because it can overlook half of the city center, especially the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room facing west, which can often have a panoramic view of the sunset.

For a period of time from January to February last year, every time I passed this floor-to-ceiling window and saw the balcony half-covered with snow outside the window, the image of myself jumping from there would always appear in my mind. It was the coldest time in Winnipeg at that time, and the wind was howling outside the window every day, and there was a lot of snow.

I have imagined many very specific ways of dying, feelings, moods, and the possible reactions of people around me, especially the possible reactions of relatives and friends. Although he didn't really try to commit suicide, he felt that he was approaching death, very close to death, so close that he could see its eyebrows clearly. Accompanied by this kind of imagination is a broken self and a life with no way out. The connection with others has become distant, fuzzy and abstract, and the most unbreakable relationship is like a thin thread holding me, but as I become heavier, it seems to be broken at any time . I miss my parents a lot, it's like a constant confirmation of the existence of that thread.

Imagining death triggers intense death anxiety. I realize that anxiety is a good thing, that I have not been completely sucked into the black hole of myself, and I can monitor and check myself from the perspective of a bystander, repeatedly pulling myself back to reality. But that's all I can do. I was exhausted, and I feared that one day I would be taken away by the nothingness, suddenly seized by it, and just give up.

It's like being in a closed, one-on-one negotiation scene, forced to confront death naked, mediate and negotiate with it. But can't leave, can't even avoid its gaze. I have nowhere to hide, I can only delay time and bargain; I keep turning around in the dead end, trying to get a little distance from it.

And I'm actually in a physical enclosure—Winnipeg winters are long and harsh, and it's dark by four in the afternoon. I seldom go out on weekdays. I have no public life and no private life. I can only stay with myself. I have been working from home, facing the screen all day and night, and have no social activities other than checking social media. After a long time, I feel that my emotions have deteriorated, my perception is numb, and I don’t even know how to speak. Life is barren to nothing, just trying to get by day after day.

At that time, North America was in the period when Omicron was raging. I went out once that month, took a bus with only me except the driver, went to an empty supermarket, and came back and was inexplicably tricked. I had a fever for three days, went through the symptoms one by one, and wondered if I might die at home alone.

When the depression was at its worst, I didn't eat for two or three days, couldn't move for more than a week, and could only lie in bed lethargic all day long; after that, I would binge eat and consume uncontrollably High-salt, high-sugar, and high-calorie foods, let them become garbage in the body, fat piled up and overflowed, and I gained weight to an unprecedented degree.

I finally understand why depressed patients can't seek help. They are deeply trapped in this kind of self-wrestling, and they are involved in the spiraling spiritual black hole. They don't even have the slightest outward initiative, and even lose the nerve function of normal action. I forgot the power of the language I had mastered, and they all turned into sharp arrows stabbing at myself, censoring and whipping myself all the time. There are too many shames, self-blame, and regrets that are not humane, all of which are inflated excessively under the rendering of language. Those extremely destructive self-deprecations are full of daily conversations with myself.

Every morning when I open my eyes, my first thought is that I am a waste, and this waste is a little older.

It is difficult for me to recall what kind of person I was before the epidemic. I must have changed my personality since I came into contact with death and opened my imagination to it. I didn't suddenly stumble and fall into the valley of the shadow of death, but I have been walking towards it for the past three years, and I have been sinking, trying to maintain but no improvement. My life went from bad to worse, and everything backfired. All I could do was to maintain a decent face during the fall, but when I fell to the bottom, I didn't even have a decent face.

Depression is a desolate mind, obesity is a derelict body. I am like a trash can that has been moved around, being thrown away by this world. We are not our own masters, but the peripheral nerves and epidermal cells of this world; when it gets sick, we pass it on to share its pain, or are shed and eliminated in the metabolism.

die.

Death is the dissolution of the boundaries of the ego. I can no longer feel my body, my skin, my heartbeat, I am merged into infinity with the universe around me, so I can no longer define where "me" is. It no longer makes any difference whether the external information is sound, color, smell or touch. I'm just a consciousness in a vacuum, a jumble of codes with broken signals popping up at random.

Numerous illusions flicker in the violent solar storm, the halo of the nebula blooms enchantingly on the dome, stretching and changing the delicate colors from pink green, pink blue to pink, forming rounds of dazzling aurora in the static time and space, I I have never seen such dazzling brilliance, it is almost like entering the apocalypse.

There is no time anymore, only eternity. Eternity is as long as death, and in death I am forced to be awake. I was trapped in a dream that eternity had, and my whole life was an idea in its dream, and I saw the whole truth through death. The world was spinning like a colorful soap bubble, and I forgot how I got into this bubble. There is no cause and effect, no history, and all meaning is lost. I am like a noisy but blank radio signal, exiled in this endless nothingness.

If I am still conscious in death, I will find that this is a huge conspiracy when I look back at the previous intertwined origins from such an end point. How every person I meet, everything I experience, every decision I make, every occasional accident lures me step by step into the fate of death. It was really a calculated, protracted sting. The world had been woven for this trap. It's ridiculous.

Now it's got me.

I know it's too late, it's too far away. My body is lost in an unknown corner. Beneath the memory of being razed to the ground by overwhelming fear is a surging sadness, like a bottomless underground river. who I am? I can't remember anything, but I think of some people I've met who are witnesses to my existence. I had to make a final confession with them and tell them the truth I knew. Even if I can't piece together what they look like, even if I don't know if they exist.

I shrieked and shattered, and the pieces exploded with the sudden collapse of my personality, scattered along the way. Then, the remnant of me crawled back slowly like a newborn baby, and found the pieces in a counterclockwise direction, messily making up the shape of the world in the mirror. I have been looking at this mirror world for a long time, like a goldfish looking at its tank, separated by a thick layer of water or vacuum. Beyond the distance of the senses, all ordinary objects there appear extremely strange and fresh.

I was taken to the hospital. I thought that when I woke up, I would see my parents who had been waiting for a long time, and we would hug each other. Isn't that what they always do on TV? But I waited and waited, and finally realized that there was only me here, from the beginning to the present.

I thought of the night many years ago when I cried all the way home after a big fight with my parents. The quarrel was about my determination to go to New York. Then everything changed and that was the fork into this parallel universe.

I don't understand why I have to leave.

I couldn't stop crying. I even cried and murmured the name of my mother country, which I had long been ashamed to say. I wept with joy that all the fall of my hometown might have been a nightmare too, and now that nightmare is over.

The Chinese are really bitter and bitter.

For Thanksgiving at the end of 2021, Hari came to Winnipeg from New York to see me. That period was the busiest time for me—I just found a new job in Winnipeg, and I had to adapt to a lot of new affairs. I had another part-time job before I had time to adjust the time, and I had to work consecutively after work. There are a lot of cumbersome materials to prepare for applying for a status online, and I am in a state of chaos every day.

I once told him euphemistically that I would be very busy and might not have the time and energy to take care of him, but he said it was okay, he just wanted to visit me and he could take care of himself. I was a little moved after listening to it.

But his expectations were always too high. He stayed at my house for five days, and for three days I worked from nine o'clock in the morning until late at night and went straight to bed, with only time to eat and drink. My heart is full of exhaustion and impatience, I am too lazy to talk, and I don’t have more attention and emotional space for him. Even the existence of an extra person in the family is a kind of disturbance to me, although I try my best to control the negative Emotions are not shown, but there is no enthusiasm.

He was very disappointed and felt that I was completely ignoring him, so he couldn't help arguing with me and said, "I thought you would be very happy to see you from so far."

I thought it was ridiculous at the time, and I was the one who was wronged. Can you reflect on your privilege? You were born and raised in America and never experienced the turmoil and struggle of a person without an identity. You can do whatever you want. When you reach middle age, you don’t have to think about the burden of career and family. You only focus on pursuing interests and self-realization. Of course you don’t understand that I am forced to make a living to do a job I don’t like, and I’m stuck in a place I don’t like. what a pain. Every day I see other humanitarian disasters in my country on the Internet, and looking back, my life is also a mess. From the inside out, there is no problem that can be solved, and there is no place where I can feel at ease. Why do you expect me to do more emotional labor and take care of your little emotions?

After leaving New York during the epidemic, I was depressed inside, but even those closest to me often took my emotional expressions as complaints. They always say: It's OK, You will be fine, everything will pass, everything will be fine, I want to open up... At the end, I just shut up. I deeply understand why most people want to follow the crowd, because when your life trajectory is too special, few people understand what happened to you, empathize with your trauma, and this sense of isolation is the most uncomfortable.

During the last conflict with Hari, I was again frustrated by the communication barrier. I can't explain from the beginning the whole context in which I've gotten here, it's a chasm neither of us can bridge. I am angry that this relationship is so unequal that the party who is already in trouble has to bear not only the labor of coping with the dilemma, but also the labor of explaining its own dilemma.

Explanation is always a task of the weak. I am not a native English speaker, so I feel the strenuousness of this labor even more.

What makes me feel even more inferior is, how can a person grow up in a friendly, responsive and supportive environment, so that he always confidently asks for the emotional labor of others? But I have long been used to digesting my emotions by myself no matter what happens.

So I decided to call it a day. Quarreling is futile consumption, anyway, it will not touch the issues I really care about, it is better to have as little trouble as possible. I have gone too far, my burden is too heavy, my heart is too tortuous, my true self is placed in layers of checkpoints, he has no channel to reach him, and I don't trust him enough to be more open. In the last two days, we pretended nothing happened and went out to play. I still tried my best to be the landlord and took him to the few places worth visiting. The streets of the city are covered with fresh snow, and when the roads are slippery, we will hold hands and lean together. I said, I still appreciate you being with me during my most difficult time.

Hari and I met on a dating app at the beginning of the pandemic. I've dated quite a few people in NYC and got tired of always getting stuck in the repetitive introductions and warm-up phases without being able to make a deep connection. I stopped dating white guys a long time ago because there was no basis for empathy. Although they were all nice, they were homogeneous and boring, and there was always a feeling of incompatibility when communicating. During the severe lack of public activities during the epidemic, I opened the APP and swiped to Hari. He is an Indian born in the United States. He has a younger sister who also works in New York. His father is a multinational businessman who has passed away, and his mother lives alone. in Chicago.

Our first date went well, Hari had no airs, was humorous and gracious. I took him to eat Yunnan rice noodle, he raved about it, we chatted non-stop and relaxed the whole time. Because he was an exchange student at Tsinghua University and worked in Beijing for a while, we were able to discuss many topics about China, and he always tried to speak a few words in Chinese. After graduating from the Department of Computer Science, he went to study for a doctorate in law. When I met him, he was planning to resign from a start-up company and start studying for a doctorate in mathematics, with the goal of becoming a researcher. I like smart and studious people, and this spirit of lifelong learning and cross-professional exploration also resonates with me.

Hari has a strong curiosity and interest in trying new things, and New York is the perfect place to explore new things. When we were together, whenever we had time, we ate, drank and had fun everywhere. We also went to many places and left many happy memories. But gradually, I felt that although we were good playmates, it was difficult to develop further and connect on some serious and even difficult issues, so he couldn't touch the deepest emotions in my heart.

This involves the meaning of life that I practice, a large part of which comes from public life, concern for social issues and sense of responsibility. In comparison, my ego is really not big enough to support my entire life. But I don't see in him this kind of pursuit beyond self, and the depth brought by pain.

I have read an article written by Wang Danyang about studying in a foreign land, and I have the same feeling for the experience she described. The author is studying screenwriting at a film school in Vancouver, and she is the only East Asian face in the class. She wrote that she couldn't understand why her female classmate would write a nonsensical, out-of-the-box absurd story in the first long script of her life-about a rich girl who wanted to become a big ass. But she is always asking for meaning.

"My Chinese friend said that the Chinese are really bitter and bitter. It's not interesting to watch anything. The threshold for spiritual satisfaction is too high! I think it is, a kind of collective unconsciousness of the weak that has been passed down from generation to generation in the blood. flow, so it cannot resonate with the nonsense of Westerners based on boundless freedom."

"Don't we start by asking about meaning when we look at anything? This is the logical origin of Chinese-style education planted in the soil of my thinking. Reading books are the meaning of life for generations after China's reform and opening up. The books in the book Everything taught me to look for meaning. But when you find the general mental state of Westerners with a thin sense of meaning, you have to reflect on whether your own species has been living too tired. But how can you explain it? With an unrestrained spirit, why do their planes and satellites still go up faster than most socialist countries?..."

I used to think that I was a person with a very low degree of "Sinicization", and I was indifferent to many traditional values and cultures, such as collectivism. But now I also deeply understand the importance of cultural background for emotional connection. Born in a high-context culture, when entering the low-context culture of Western society, it is like entering seawater from fresh water, which is inherently unacclimatized. I still care about whether the other party has experience that I can learn from each other. It is precisely because effective communication is based on rich situations that we care so much about the deep meaning of things, and are so good at associating and trying to figure out more hints beyond language, and that is where emotions hide and last, just like a A deep tunnel full of history. A low-context culture, on the other hand, requires me to be able to speak directly and instantly with precise language—what I say means everything. That's probably why, in my interactions with Hari, I felt so powerless to have to verbalize all of my context. As someone who makes a living out of languages, I feel even more frustrated when I'm verbally powerless.

But I want to say that later I understood both of us. When I broke free from the quagmire and began to reflect on my relationship with Hari, I acknowledged his innocence and no responsibility for my political depression. He was lucky to grow up in a "place where history ends", and he has the right to freely explore love, expand life as a normal person, and obtain legitimate emotional needs. The black hole that lingers behind me like a ghost, draining my energy and emotions is a bottomless pit that spans generations and no outsider should be drawn into it.

Stopping my life from being swallowed by that black hole should be my own responsibility in the first place. I can learn not to keep pushing the priority of my needs back. I always tell myself that I have "more important things" to do, so I ignore the feelings of myself and the people around me, and don't manage the relationship with them. Is this also the tyranny I impose on myself?

I already see her as part of the struggle

By chance, I met a Chinese girl, Jing, in the same apartment building. When I got home one day, I got into the same elevator as her, and she struck me up, and soon found out that we lived on the same floor. After we got out of the elevator, we actually stood on the corridor and chatted. Most of the chat content was complaining about Canada and Winnipeg.

She came to Canada from the U.S. at about the same time as me. She also took a short-term course that was extremely useless in order to go through the immigration process. She learned some things that could not help her career direction. We immediately had a feeling of sympathy.

When people are most frustrated, it is salvation to find someone to complain with.

Later I found out that she was the legendary She Niu. Through her, I met her roommate, a Chinese girl who works in the provincial government, and then there are several other Chinese who live in the same building. I have nothing in common with them, just like refugees who fell behind on the way to escape and got together randomly, and there was no choice for each other. But during that time I desperately wanted to meet some friends, so I tried to attend when everyone had events.

Jing knew absolutely nothing about politics, or the feminist and civil society issues I cared about, and her passion was dating and finding a partner. But maybe because of the caring nature of medical workers, she will listen to me very patiently, ask questions sincerely, and never judge lightly. Being able to do this is much better than countless "everything will be fine" reassurances.

We often visit each other and have many long conversations during the long Canadian winter nights. Because there are so many difficult times to pass, we can pour out the details of the cause and effect without worrying about delaying each other.

Several times when I was talking, I felt a miraculous feeling—"I can finally speak", as if I had regained the ability to speak.

Several times when I was chatting, I looked up and saw the snow-covered city under the dark blue night outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and felt that I was in a comfortable and safe place. It was as if I once stumbled and fell off a remote cliff. I was supposed to fend for myself, but was rescued by an ordinary passerby. I am free to come and go here, because she doesn't know me in the past, who I am and who I am, and it doesn't matter what I do or don't do.

Jing is like carrying the Florida sun with her, an energy motor who will try her best to have fun in her boring life. She will keep sending out invitations to me, do you want to play this? Do you want to eat this? If it weren't for her insisting on exploring Winnipeg, I might not have any impression of this place until I got the maple leaf card and ran away.

In severe cold days, the Red River near the apartment is covered with thick ice. The government cleared the snow from the river, and sorted out a winding two-way runway for citizens to skate and play. Enticed by Jing, I made a special trip to the supermarket to buy a pair of skates, and went skating on the river with them. This was my first time skating on natural water ice. Since the ice surface was not as flat as the artificial one, I fell into a coma.

Jing tried her best to invite me to go skiing again. I shied away a few times under the pretext of being busy with work, but I actually had a little fear of extreme sports in my heart. After all, I'd broken my spine trying to climb the previous summer and realized I was way past the age of being strong. Later, because there was really nothing better to do in the winter in Canada, I watched a wave of ski teaching videos on Youtube, and I followed her to a beginner-friendly ski resort with a solid foundation in my mind.

Skiing is really an addictive sport, and its fascination is the constant challenge of fear and the thrill of constantly swinging between the edge of fear and excitement. Galloping on the pure white snow field, the spiritual world will be occupied by such strong and pure emotions. In the process of high-speed taxiing, in addition to focusing on observing the surrounding environment, it is to control the movement of the body, and you will forget everything else. Every time I slide down, I am often exhausted and ache all over, but my mood is very positive and comfortable, and the messy garbage in my mind seems to be swept away.

Skiing has refreshed my understanding and practice on a physical level of how the body and the environment interact; acquiring this new skill is a simultaneous enlightenment of the body and mind. For beginners, skiing is actually quite counter-intuitive. If you don’t want to fall, you have to keep your body forward. If you want to turn/decelerate, you have to press your center of gravity on the foot on the side of the mountain. However, because of fear, beginners will instinctively sit back or tilt their center of gravity to the mountain, which makes them more likely to fall and lose control. And I was also very afraid of bumping into other skiers on the way, but found that the more I was afraid, the more I couldn't avoid it. Because when a person is in a panic, the brain will stop thinking and cannot give effective commands to the body. The instinct of fear will take control, and the judgment of instinct is often wrong.

Therefore, the process of learning is to constantly use your own rationality to overcome your instincts, remind yourself that the more afraid you are, the more calm you should be, try to think proactively, and use skills to control, instead of passively evading or simply and rudely confronting. With the accumulation of experience, I am more and more able to understand the performance of the body and the environment, enough to predict various situations in taxiing, and the role of rationality no longer lags behind, but gradually becomes muscle memory, forming a new instinct.

Jing is very courageous and belongs to a madman who can use a plow to rush into the underworld. But I was injured before, and I was very cautious. I could only practice slowly on the rookie slope and the green track, and my progress was not as fast as hers.

Once we went skating at night, and the temperature was close to minus 30 degrees that night. I wore two layers of down jackets to barely bear it. Jing and another friend were so cold that they ran into the service station to keep warm. When they came out, they laughed out loud when they saw me. The sweat and breath from my strenuous exercise hit my face and quickly froze, so my eyelashes, eyebrows, and bangs were all covered with white icicles, and every strand of my hair was frozen hard when I touched it. up.

At the end of the spring snow season, Jing and I took the time to go skiing a few more times, until the dry snow powder under our feet turned into slag and became extremely slippery. I fell hard into the woods next to the slope and sprained my left knee. In the pain, I found a pheasant tilting its neck and looking at me from among the bushes close at hand, and suddenly wanted to laugh again.

Amazingly, skiing allowed me to reclaim my body, take back control of my body, and greatly restore my agency - something I had lost during my severe depression and death anxiety. As I gradually learned to make detailed manipulations of my body and more and more of the movements I envisioned, I felt like my body and mind were one and firmly grounded again.

It turned out that I had not given up on my body, and it would never give up on me.

I experienced the awe of nature, and at the same time, I was moved by the power of human reason and skill. This sport also awakened the enthusiasm I have always been familiar with, to take risks in this world and play with this world. An unexpected exit from the black hole of ego.

Once the power is restored, there will be inertia to make persistent efforts. I also went to the gym with Jing, and I developed the habit of exercising again more than ten years after I graduated from college. When I was diligent, I actually went to the gym after work six or seven times a week.

Exercise is really life-saving. Every exercise has an immediate effect on improving my mood. I tidied up the house, stopped overeating, ate more vegetables and low-sugar and low-fat foods, and my obesity problem was under control, and the accumulated fat was also slowly reduced.

Thinking back now, there was no solution to the problems that bothered me at the time. I broke the mental predicament by forcibly mobilizing my body, but if it weren't for the intervention of my friends, I might not have come out so smoothly.

After the winter passed, and the new crown epidemic was coming to an end, my life seemed to recover with the warmer weather. I got rid of an unsuitable employer, got a long-awaited job, and the immigration process went smoothly. I traveled a lot, went to Vancouver, New York, California, got back to seeing a lot of my friends, got back into the community, and it just keeps getting better.

After autumn came, Jing and I drove all the way south from Winnipeg, crossed the Canada-US border overland, went to Minneapolis for a weekend, and took a lot of photos of each other. We chatted all the way during the 7-hour journey each way. I can't even think of it now, what have we had to talk about for such a long time? I'm afraid that he has poured out all the bad things from childhood to adulthood.

She sometimes said that she didn't understand what I said, and she didn't understand some of the articles I wrote, but she was always a loyal and reliable listener. After the Sitongqiao protest, another friend and I wanted to go to a nearby university to put up posters of solidarity. She printed dozens of posters for me with the printer in the office without asking anything. While she was never politicized, friends like her have always supported me through human connection, so I already saw her as part of the struggle.

Winnipeg is a lackluster city. This is the place where I was at the lowest point of my life, hiding too much humiliation and regret. From now on, once we get the status, most of us will go our separate ways. However, Jing made a lot of good things happen in this city. She changed what Winnipeg meant to me so that the surviving ending overlaid the failing and sinking beginning, which made the whole story never the same again. No matter where I go in the future, when I look back on my time in Winnipeg, I will not only think about the trauma, but I will definitely be inspired by this experience.

I will carry your heart until it feels strong enough to rise again.

The Burning Man Festival in 2019 was the third consecutive year I went to Burning Man Festival, and I thought at the time that I should never go again.

The biggest shock to me that year was the Hong Kong movement in the summer and what happened to me afterward, which changed my emotions so drastically that I fled from my own country. Not long after I landed in Los Angeles, I entered the Black Rock Desert in a state of restlessness. I wanted to temporarily escape reality and hide in this sanctuary that had brought me great inspiration and energy.

However, even in an isolated place, I couldn't take my attention away from reality. I am always distracted and absent-minded in countless gaps, thinking about everything that happened in China, and it is difficult to integrate into the present. Looking at the carnival crowd around me, I felt extremely absurd and ridiculous - such important things are happening in reality, people are suffering and asking for help, but why do we gather in an imaginary utopia to entertain ourselves and deceive ourselves?

At that moment, I firmly understood that my responsibility has always been in reality, not in these so-called large-scale social experiments, physical and spiritual exploration activities.

In the blink of an eye three years have passed, and I have never returned to China. After experiencing a complete epidemic, I went to another country; like many activists, I have no name, and I have been thrown into Sisyphus-style futile resistance, and I have also encountered one after another life and moments of self-destruction, and I feel exhausted physically and mentally.

In 2022, I spent more than half a year to put my broken self back together, and then stick them together again. As the lengthy restoration project draws to a close, Burning Man returns after a two-year hiatus. I thought of the love it once taught me, the purest and most intense connection between people. Even if it looks like a performance in an overhead theater, we have all been involved in the show and moved our true feelings.

I miss it so much and long to relive that love. After the epidemic, I often feel that I don't want to take care of the world anymore. Love is what I want most.

So, in my heart, I see Burning Man as the end of this healing journey. I want to be there to cut off the distractions of the outside world, focus all my attention on myself, and ask myself the most important questions to reach this final journey.

While preparing to go to Burning Man, I reconnected with my friends in California — we barely communicated during the pandemic. I still remember that day, when Xiaoxi called me to discuss the organization work, I finally heard her long-lost voice again. Unexpectedly, as soon as the two of us asked about each other's recent situation, we couldn't wait to confide all the experiences of the past three years. Then I was surprised to find that we have all fallen to the bottom of our lives, and our mental journeys are so different.

We couldn't help choking up on the phone. At that moment, we were separated by the entire land of the United States, and we wanted to hug each other tightly immediately. I can't bear to imagine that each other is extremely lonely and helpless in the most painful time, but knowing that this is not my problem alone, I feel great comfort.

We saw some old friends at Burning Man, and met more newcomers who attended for the first time, but it’s been a long time, and many people have lost. We chatted about them, so many unnecessary thoughts were settled.

The climate of Burning Man this year is very harsh, or we have not been back for so long that we have long forgotten the hardships we have suffered. Half of the time in my memory was blown by sandstorms, the flimsy camp tents were blown crookedly, and the overwhelming dust covered the whole playa, and the field of vision was white, and the wind and sand hit the bare chest and calves, even a little painful .

Once we desperately went through a raging sandstorm to hide in the central tent. The clothes, skin and hair were covered with dense gray and white mud spots, and the original color had long been lost. Another time, we broke into a sandstorm in the middle of the night, like sinking into a turbid deep sea, and it was difficult to discern the direction. Following the crumbling fire on the central axis, Xiaoxi and I rode to the temple with difficulty, and were immediately shocked by the sight in front of us. In the diffused neon lights, the temple is out of magic, like a huge star falling in an uninhabited secret place, surrounded by darkness and pressure, and it secretly exudes rose red and blue energy.

This is the fourth time I come to Burning Man, and the novelty and surprise of the first time are no longer there. Many activities that used to shatter the three views no longer attract us. Now we look at those newcomers who are newcomers, just like looking at ourselves-young people are excited every day, and with strong FOMO emotions. Try everything in a few days.

The only thing I want to do when I get back is to go and stay in the temple. The temple is a mobile museum of death, a safe space to explore death. Every year, we see the faces and stories of countless new dead, and think about our own lives surrounded by these dead groups. It helped me find peace, let go of my emotions, and get naked about my vulnerability as a human being.

In my mind, the temple is the real soul of Burning Man. All the revelry here would be meaningless without the presence and presence of death. When too many people's emotions and thoughts gather here, it seems to form a special energy field, which makes my spiritual world pure and can resonate with everyone present. Xiaoxi said that every time she approached the temple, she wanted to cry, but I found that I could only fully open up my emotions here, and I could only express some deep-seated words here.

When I was close to death, I stubbornly believed that the perception of death is a watershed for people, and those who know death and those who don't know death can never be in the same frequency. Only when people have an understanding of death can they truly understand people and many things in the world.

We couldn't wait to go to the temple on the first night when we arrived in Black Rock City. We thought we were just looking at its appearance, but we didn't expect to go in and sit down, and we started to talk about it unconsciously. People who knew us came and went, but we were completely immersed in deeper and deeper conversations.

We talked for more than three hours, crying most of the time. The tears kept streaming down, and I couldn't wipe them clean. We have accumulated so much trauma, lost for so long in that banal and rough material world. Unable to let go, unable to digest, the injury happened just like that, and it will eat us like a gangrene for a long time, and there is nothing we can do so far.

Later, we went to the temple many times, in the hot sun during the day, in the cold and magnificent night, in the morning and evening of sunrise and sunset. People come and go, leaving love poems and paper flowers, and we witness the temple gradually being filled with offerings.

I said to Xiaoxi, I want to put the list of those unknown dead during the new crown epidemic in China into the temple. I actually wanted to prepare before I came to Burning Man, but didn't do it-like too many thoughts I snuffed out. She said that she wanted to help me with this, so we deliberately went to the Starlink in the camp next door, downloaded the list compiled by the folks from the Internet, and then she reproduced it bit by bit with Polaroid, and solemnly put it in the god A prominent place in the temple.

When we walked out of the temple late one night, I was immersed in my thoughts and suddenly said, I think I am not brave enough. There are too many things that I regret that I failed to do. Xiaoxi firmly responded that you are already very brave. Then we stopped halfway, facing the deep wilderness night, saw each other's faces clearly through a little light from the temple, and started talking for hours.

I find that every time she can get closer to my heart, she is always willing to wait enough time for it. Finally at some point, I felt like she was going to touch the most vulnerable part of my heart, can I hand over that part? I think so, I trust her so much that it's easy to let all my guard down.

When she gently touched that most vulnerable part, it was like the accumulated pain was being soothed, and I felt a huge healing. What a wonderful and pitiful creature man is, he must rely on others to confirm his own existence value. Just because there is someone in this world who can open my heart and is willing to go to the end and see my heart, even if she does nothing, I feel saved.

That moment can only happen at the right time and place, so natural and unusual, and I am so grateful for it. Every time I think about it, I can't help but get tears in my eyes. This love surpasses any form I have ever known, even if it cannot be by my side all the time, but whether it has been or not is the difference in quality.

And even more importantly, I know I can do the same for her. Even though I am a drained and broken human being, compared to millions of other people in the world, it is still me who can catch her and give her the inspiration and courage that she loves so much that I no longer feel like myself is an incompetent person.

I am afraid of my incompetence, but this is not the ability of tools required by the capital society, but the ability to give back to these friends and communities. I remembered that when I came to Burning Man for the first time, a burner said: "Don't be afraid that you are not capable, you have the ability to love, and that's enough." Hearing this sentence made me feel even more inferior, because I lack It is the ability to love that I am still trying to build after all these years.

We're pretty much inseparable at Burning Man. One night, we walked into a cool and eerie neon-colored altar on the playa, and the walls of the altar were covered with English poems. I pointed to the last sentence of one of the paragraphs, and read it to her word by word:

I will carry your heart until it feels strong enough to rise again.

On the last day of Burning Man, before the temple was burned down, Black Rock City began preparations for a mass evacuation. At dusk, the burners were busy tearing down the tents. I went to Playa for the last time with Xiaoxi, Tongtong and Grace. As the sun sets in the west, the heat in the desert fades away, and the warm geothermal heat mixed with the oncoming cool breeze is a rare comfort. The empty playa is very quiet, only the sound of our bicycle wheels turning can be heard, and the afterglow behind the mountain stretches our shadows.

We like to visit the art installations on playa after the crowd subsides and take a few leisurely photos, which has become a repertoire for me and Xiaoxi at Burning Man. This time, we went to the depths of the playa and found a device that we had missed before. Two huge mirrored figures stood hand in hand on the wilderness, reflecting the mountains and the setting sun on the distant horizon.

What is even more surprising is that a float is parked at the foot of the statue, and in the open space beside the float, there is a DJ playing discs leisurely, and the people around are sitting or lying on the dance floor without boundaries, or following the intoxicated dancers. Dance to the music and enjoy this final reunion as if Burning Man had just begun.

Xiaoxi, Tongtong and I couldn't help dancing to the music. At this time, I was carefree, immersed in the present moment, surrounded by pure, peaceful joy, so good that I seemed to be chosen by the blessing of God.

"I'm so happy!" we repeated, laughing. Inadvertently, I saw two lines of tears streaming down from Tongtong's smiling eyes, and my tears came out of my eyes all of a sudden. At that time, I really realized what it means to "cry with joy". We cried and laughed, and the three of us held each other's hands and looked at each other for a long time. Compared with the long conversation in the temple on the first day, the flow of emotions at this moment no longer requires words. Time seemed to stand still, and only our existence in each other's eyes remained in the world.

The biggest charm of Burning Man is that you never know what will happen next moment. All events are improvised. At a moment you are not prepared to look forward to, it will catch you off guard. And this time it did not let me disappointment. Towards the end, I clearly felt that the struggle between Xiaoxi and I subsided, and a rare determination appeared on our faces, and we unloaded the burden we carried when we came.

In the past few times, I have come here with many problems, looking forward to a turnaround in the next year, but every year I get more and more unresolved. But this time, the inertia of constant anxiety has finally bottomed out. After stripping away the tedious self and breaking the fetters with the past, I return to zero, and I am also unprecedentedly light. I am engulfed by this non-stop chaotic world, and I am rising irresistibly.

That night, when I watched the temple blaze, and the soaring fire light illuminated the dark clouds in the night sky, I felt that I also rose up with the thousands of sparks that flickered.