sun flower

It hasn't rained in a while, and it's been drying out again recently. I found another body lotion to use as a hand cream, and the smell was very familiar, but I subconsciously thought it smelled like a "volcano", although I didn't know what a volcano actually smelled like.

I live in a place with a volcano, and sometimes I ride a bike and see the sunset on the opposite hill, a very beautiful orange-purple color, and then I am surprised over and over again in my heart: ah, it is a volcano.

So the image of the volcano that I read in the book when I was a child and constructed in my mind appeared like this, and the volcano in front of me became romantic. It was very different from the TV news. Gentle, it can even be described as "magnificent".

If you think about it this way, maybe for TV news, erupting volcanoes are the "normal", it's about reporting everything that is in opposition to the ordinary, while for me, life under the volcano is the normal state, where the sunset shines magnificently. Mountains of color are the norm.

But when I first came to this city, the only person I knew hurried away, and I didn't even meet. I calculated the distances between the cities scattered on the map by myself, and I was shocked to find that I was farther from home, so I occasionally felt lost and at a loss.

At that time, the mood was quite sad, and I couldn't notice the volcano at all. I only remembered the sunset that I experienced every day, and finally stayed on the roof of the building that was not high and the reeds by the roadside. But after a long time, I think it looks good. A heart gradually becomes clear, you can see the different clouds every day, the mountains in the distance are continuous, and every tree in the vicinity attracts people’s attention, small-leaf banyan, magnolia, cherry blossom, golden osmanthus... My time is like this Bit by bit it fills up, new routines pour in, and volcanoes are part of the romance.

At first I was like a plant that was broken down and then cut here, maybe the one with vines, because the branches were soft, and I couldn't stand when inserted into the soil. A little rain also followed, not knowing how to absorb, nor how to talk to the surrounding vegetation.

But this is not the first time, why am I so lonely.

I have a map in my head, where the asterisks start at home, then where I left home for the first time, and then this strange place. If I go back on a first-come-first-served basis, I can barely understand the decision I made, after all, it's just a different stage of my life. But if the points are all connected to form a closed loop, looking back at the starting point from here, I find that the longest line is unfounded, and I don't even know what is between them, just see a completely blank piece , no grass grows.

It was also like jumping on a train for no apparent reason, getting used to driving forward along the way, and when it stopped suddenly, there was a huge doubt about the destination. Neither wanting to buy a return ticket to sit back, nor ready to get off at this stop, I happened to be stuck in the middle, a place where I couldn't get on or off.

It was a situation I couldn't grasp at the time, but I didn't want to tell how I got over it, and maybe there wasn't one at all.

I'm going to stop now and continue with that "broken branch" and "cutting" analogy, which came out of nowhere, but not for nothing if you think about it.

When I was young—how young was it, when my mother didn’t even think I had any memory, but I remembered that, in that kind of childhood, there was a person who used to tell me the knowledge of “cutting”. Maybe my father, I don't even remember his young face, but I always remember how he felt when he said that and how he showed it to me. But in my impression, he never once did "cutting", he just taught me this knowledge by the way when grafting peach and plum trees. So I used my imagination to successfully cut a sunflower.

I want to tell this story because I feel there is a metaphor hidden here. The peaches and plums grafted by my father may eventually bear fruit. The peaches are peaches and the plums are plums. On the same tree, they will bear many fruits without disturbing each other. But the sunflower I had cut grew into something else a few months later, adding to the grief. I don't know if something like this really happens in this world, or if my memory is faulty, but I didn't get a sunflower, but something else, I can't even name it. It just grew in my flowerpot, drinking the rainwater with all its might, growing in pieces, and soon covered my flowerpot.

The more I described it like this, the more I felt that the wrong sunflower—because I didn’t know what it was called, I replaced it with a sunflower. When I planted it, it was like planting myself. When I learned to cut a plant, I actually learned to "cut" myself. My parents folded me off, and I had to learn to dig myself into the dirt and grow back. When I have the strength, I can finally fold myself down, I can choose a place, and make cuttings to make sure I can live again.

But I still haven't learned the clever method of my father, and I don't know how to graft fruit trees, so that a peach branch can take the nutrients of the plum tree, and it will grow and bear fruit without being affected. I have only learned cuttings all my life, and at most one soft plant can survive. Maybe it would grow into something else, but it survived.

This story is also finished, maybe there is no need to explain that gap at all, I was just cutting myself in unfamiliar land, maybe because of inexperience, maybe because of the pain of connecting with the new soil, I was worried. But I should not forget that a sunflower also survived like this.