But there is no way, I still want to sing

On a depressing Monday afternoon, it seems that every time I meet someone, there is a tired look on their face, a helpless look.

There is an illusion that lingers all the time, as if the sky is cloudy, it will start to rain from this long winter, and it will not stop until October. This is what someone who hates the rainy season in Tengchong told me. She also said that there is another city here and it rains 300 days a year.

Thinking like this, I looked up the window and found that the sky was unexpectedly blue. Even though I had seen it so many times, it still felt like it was the first time I came to this world.

The afternoon was too long, music started playing in the office, and a familiar female voice sang: "I persuade myself to let go, close your eyes and let you go, burn your diary and start over."

I haven't listened to these songs for many years, and later I found out that it was Chen Huilin, and I never remembered the name of the song by heart. When I saw it was "Notepad" instead of "Diary", it felt a little unfamiliar.

This song also seems to be floating somewhere, coming from the top, in short, it is not the sound in the corner of this office.

I really want to sing.

Originally it was just a feeling, some beautiful thoughts. But when I actually said it and wrote it, I felt it was crazy and perverted enough. Like the silent singer in "Secret No. 9", the hallucination of the protagonist because he is too depressed. He will run out anytime, anywhere, and when he sees him roaring silently and doing unbearably terrifying acts, people will only collapse every time.

But there is no way, I still want to sing.

One day I went to work, and before I was ready to ride my bike, I fumbled around in my bag for a long time, but couldn't find the headphone cable. I felt that there was a huge emptiness in my heart, as if the next thing I had to endure was a very lonely thing.

But I've always had a feeling that the music people put into their ears is very private. Perhaps the act itself is very private, it is personal. The headset and me form a complete and uninterrupted world with each other.

In the past, everyone seemed to listen to the songs together, and everyone could hear them, and occasionally they would follow up and sing a sentence or two. Now the songs can only be shared at most, not listened to together. It feels like at a funeral, or other inappropriate occasions, it can be played at will, only you can hear it, or only he can hear it, which is closer to the voice of the human heart.

Headphones are the culprit of increasing this illusion. Even if they are as close as lovers, they may not often share the sound in their ears. To achieve full sharing, "I have to listen to all the songs you have heard", is even more impossible.

But there is no way, we need music. Listening to music is like falling in love, but no one gets hurt.

And singing is like some overlapping time, I always have to sing to someone. If I say I want to sing, is it like inviting someone to be the audience and we give each other's time just for this song.

Or no one was going to invite, I just wanted to sing. But this is very different from listening to music. It is no longer just flowing through my ears, flowing through my heart, covering my brand new time with a past time. I followed, wrapped around it, like the people I've listened to in the past, trying to catch up to its melody until I resurrected its dead time.

I really want to sing, and I'm not the first person to express this desire.

Every afternoon, the singing in the office floats from the streets of ten or twenty years ago, and different men and women sing their time, or lingering sorrow, or happy. The boy who was at the same time as me sang along in a low voice, and suddenly stood up across from me, letting out a sigh of relief. I heard him say that he really wanted to sing.

He really wanted to sing.

When I first came to Tengchong, I heard people say that there has been no entertainment for almost a year here. Bars, KTVs, and movie theaters are all closed for epidemic prevention. When something is forbidden, we crave it so desperately, over and over.

But when you think about it, it's not singing that's banned, it's "going to a place to sing." And who can decide where to sing, if no one sings there, it can't be called a place to sing.

I remember when my grandmother secretly went out to sing when she was young, in the mountains, in the fields, the place where she sang was all places except forbidden.

My grandmother's background was very pitiful. She went to her grandfather's house to be a child bride when she was a child. She had to finish all the work in the family before she could sneak out quietly. But she just wanted to sing, and she told me that even if someone chased after him with a torch, she would sneak away.

She didn't say whether she sang well or not, and she couldn't remember how others sang, but only mentioned who was the sister of the girl who sang together at that time, and how it is now. I know she only talks about one thing, and that is to sing.

Now I can only talk about one thing, that is, I want to sing. When my grandmother talked about the pain she had suffered because she ran out to sing secretly, she probably thought the same thing: but there was no way, she still wanted to sing.

Jacky Cheung actually released a song in 2014, called "I just want to sing", which was included in the solo album "Waking Up and Dreaming". He was no longer young at that time, and it was no longer the era that once swept the music world.

But he has sung all those beautiful songs. So of course he can play unscrupulously like that, express his love for singing in an infinite way, and only talk about "wanting to sing" and "singing".

In my opinion, this is the same as when my grandmother told me about "singing" when she got old. Because she thought about it and sang it.

But I'm different, I haven't sung my own song yet.

In addition to singing, I thought of writing, and writing may be the same. If you don't write, but keep talking about "writing" and "wanting to write," you will never be able to revive the time in it, just watch how it flows. That time had nothing to do with me, nor will it ever be.

Go sing, go write. I heard myself say this.