At night, Yu Yao rested in the guest room on the second floor. Jiang Zhonglin’s room was on the first floor, just below her guest room.
Yu Yao lay on the bed, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep. She didn’t know whether it was because the house was too soundproof or Jiang Zhonglin was too quiet; Yu Yao didn’t hear any sound coming from below, not even the refrigeration equipment in the room made any sound.
The unfamiliar room was simple and deserted, and it was obvious that no one had ever lived there. Although there was no strange smell, it made Yu Yao feel uncomfortable. She was extremely willful when she was young, and she finally got a little better after she was in her twenties, but it was only a little better, so she couldn’t bear it for a while.
She lifted the quilt, jumped out of bed, and jumped hard on the floor, making a dong-dong-dong sound. If the people downstairs were not deaf, they would definitely be able to hear it.
Sure enough, after a while, Jiang Zhonglin downstairs came up and knocked on the door.
“What’s wrong? Is there something wrong?”
Yu Yao opened the door to let him in and said for no reason, “The room is too hot; I can’t sleep.”
Jiang Zhonglin was still wearing long pants and long sleeves, and he looked like he hadn’t slept yet. It was strange; don’t old men usually go to bed early?
Looking at the indoor temperature display, Jiang Zhonglin sighed in his heart and said in a gentle tone, “The temperature has dropped today. The indoor temperature is adjusted to 28 degrees, which is the most suitable. It’s easy to catch a cold if it’s colder.”
“That won’t work. I just feel hot.” Yu Yao insisted.
Jiang Zhonglin hadn’t experienced Yu Yao’s bad temper for a long time. Now, after forty years, he seemed to accept it well. He didn’t say anything more and lowered the temperature for her by one degree. Seeing Yu Yao staring at him and pressing the temperature controller, Jiang Zhonglin was not at ease. Before leaving, he reminded her, “Don’t lower it any lower. You have to cover the thin quilt before going to bed.”
When he said these words, he could vaguely see his appearance in the past, a nagging young man. After Jiang Zhonglin left, Yu Yao lay back on the bed.
When he was young, Jiang Zhonglin actually lived a careless life and didn’t care much about these things. However, after marrying Yu Yao, he began to pay attention to such trivial matters, as if he understood that he had started a family and had to take good care of his beloved wife. He was busy with research every day, forgetful, and didn’t remember much.
He had to write down the things he needed to pay attention to in a notebook and took it out to look at it before going out or going home. Yu Yao once curiously flipped through his memo book and found that it was a mess, with work and life mixed together. There were notes like "I will buy braised duck when I get home from work today", "Yu Yao doesn’t eat ginger", "I will buy flowers for the third month of my marriage", and many other questions about his research. Yu Yao didn’t understand and didn’t care too much. He just thought it was stupid to carry a notebook as a memo in 2018. Wouldn’t it be better to just write it down on the phone? But Jiang Zhonglin said that many things need to be written in a notebook by hand to deepen the memory.
Thinking about this, Yu Yao’s restlessness gradually calmed down. She looked up at the dimming ceiling for a while, reached out to pull the thin blanket next to her over her body, and closed her eyes.
“Yu Yao, I hope you don’t force yourself.”
Yu Yao remembered the expression on Jiang Zhonglin’s face when he said this while sitting on the sofa in the afternoon. Since he met her, he has always been very calm, and this calmness is even a little too much, so that Yu Yao feels abnormal. Shouldn’t he be a little excited when his wife, whom he hasn’t seen for forty years, suddenly appears?
Maybe forty years is really too long, so long that you can completely forget a person, have no feelings, and naturally not be excited. If this is true, it is actually normal. Everything in this world has changed, and people can certainly change too.
Jiang Zhonglin downstairs sat in a chair in front of the French window in silence. He took off his glasses and put them on the small table on the side. The eyes of the old man no longer had the calmness and wisdom that could see through people’s hearts but were filled with a kind of confusion that could not be recovered.
At this time, the rhythmic sound of "dong-dong-dong" came from upstairs again, which brought Jiang Zhonglin back to his senses. He looked up at the upstairs, took the glasses at hand and put them on, stood up by the handrail, smiled slightly, shook his head, and sighed, “There are advantages to being old. Unlike young people, it is easy to show all your emotions.”
“Young people can’t tell what the elderly are thinking.” He smiled and talked to himself, but his eyes were very sad.
He walked upstairs and saw Yu Yao leaning against the door with his arms folded.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Yu Yao had a stern face. “I’m thirsty; I don’t know where to drink water.”
“Oh.” Jiang Zhonglin understood, “I’ll go get you some water.”
He turned around and walked downstairs again, and Yu Yao followed him.
Jiang Zhonglin: “I’ll go get you some water; you go and rest.”
Yu Yao: “Oh.” He didn’t stop and followed Jiang Zhonglin.
Jiang Zhonglin stopped talking.
He went to the kitchen to pour her some water, and Jiang Zhonglin led her to introduce how to use various things at home. After forty years of renewal, many products have changed a lot.
Yu Yao forgot to bring her cell phone when she went out to buy groceries. Now she saw Jiang Zhonglin open the large wall-mounted screen in the living room and tell her how to change the program. Then she remembered a question.
“What do cell phones look like now?”
Jiang Zhonglin took off a black button from his watchband, and the small button unfolded in his hand and turned into a palm-sized screen.
“The current cell phone is equivalent to the ID card, bank card, and some other cards in the past. You need to bind your identity, pay, browse information, contact people, and use this. It also binds the security system and adjustment system at home. It is also equivalent to a personal computer. Many people now use this to process information.” Jiang Zhonglin explained.
Yu Yao looked at it and said, “I thought the screen would become very big.”
Jiang Zhonglin: “You can adjust the screen size yourself. I am more used to this.” He demonstrated it, and sure enough, the screen could be enlarged or reduced.
Yu Yao finally found a little bit of things that made her feel good after forty years. What she was most annoyed about before was the pile of various certificates and the increasingly large cell phones that were inconvenient to carry.
“I’ll go get you an ID and residence permit tomorrow and then buy you a cell phone.”
“Oh.” Yu Yao sat on the sofa, picked up the TV control panel, and began to fumble with it.
Seeing her slumped over and fiddling with the control panel, with no intention of paying attention to him, Jiang Zhonglin remembered that Yu Yao was like this before. She liked to play games, and when she wasn’t working, she was addicted to games. She was an older Internet addict. He stood aside for a while and advised like a helpless old father, “You are tired today; why don’t you take a rest first and get familiar with this tomorrow?”
Yu Yao didn’t even raise her head. “I can’t sleep.”
There was no choice; Jiang Zhonglin had to walk away and not disturb her.
Jiang Zhonglin returned to his room, and the door was closed with a click. Yu Yao stopped moving, raised her head, looked at Jiang Zhonglin’s door, and didn’t move for a long time. Suddenly, a burst of music sounded on the TV, and Yu Yao turned her attention back to the flashing big screen. She searched for a large game she often played and then found out...
“It’s shut down!” It was shut down twenty years ago.
She was so angry that she kicked a sofa pillow away and searched for other games angrily, but she needed to prove her identity when logging in. As someone who currently had no identity proof, Yu Yao could only quit and then kicked another pillow away.
She searched one by one for everything she was familiar with. Some of them could still be found, but they had all changed, and most of them could no longer be found. She thought of the phrase "things have changed, people have changed", and she felt very upset.
Suddenly, her hand paused, and her stern face finally showed a little joy. The author of her favorite adventure novel had been writing it intermittently for ten years, and she had waited from high school to marriage, but it was still a long way from the end. She thought she would never see the ending in this life, but now she found out that it was officially finished ten years ago! I can actually see the end of this big pit in my lifetime!
After staying up most of the night to finish reading this book, I saw the author’s conclusion at the end—people will eventually part, and we are experiencing a parting every moment.
Yu Yao threw down the control screen, fell on the sofa, and closed her eyes.
Jiang Zhonglin was still there, but she felt that she had parted with the familiar Jiang Zhonglin forever.
Yu Yao fell asleep on the sofa. Not long after, Jiang Zhonglin’s door was quietly opened. The man who should have fallen asleep long ago was still neatly dressed in the clothes he wore during the day, with no intention of resting. He walked gently to Yu Yao’s side, picked up the two pillows on the ground, turned off the TV, and picked up Yu Yao with difficulty.
“I’m old, old.” He sighed with a light breath.
When Yu Yao woke up in the morning, she found herself lying on the bed in the guest room, covered with a blanket. She sat on the bed and thought, could Mr. Jiang still hold her up?
She got up, brushed her teeth, washed her face, and walked downstairs. When she reached the stairs, she heard the voice of a strange old man coming from the living room.
“Hey, Mr. Jiang, will you go fishing with me today? My son will drive us there later. We will have lunch at the fish restaurant over there at noon, and then ask my son to pick you up in the afternoon.”
Jiang Zhonglin’s voice sounded, “I’m not going. You go by yourself. I have something to do. I have something to do these days.”
The strange old man had a loud voice and sounded like a very hearty old man. “Hey, what can you do? It’s just research. You stay at home all day to do those things. Your brain is damaged, and your body is worse than mine, who is over seventy years old.”
Jiang Zhonglin still said in a leisurely tone, “I really have something to do.”
“Then tell me, what’s the matter?”
Jiang Zhonglin didn’t answer.
Strange old man: “Look, you just don’t want to go.”
Yu Yao walked down the stairs, and the sound of footsteps attracted the attention of the strange old man. He turned his head curiously and saw Yu Yao walking down the stairs.
Because there were only Jiang Zhonglin’s clothes in this house, Yu Yao wore a shirt and big shorts of Jiang Zhonglin after taking a bath yesterday. The old pedant’s plain big shorts and shirt were not only ill-fitting but also wrinkled when worn by Yu Yao.
She looked like she had just gotten up, and she didn’t even wear shoes, barefoot, which stunned the strange old man. He was a little surprised, and after a long while, he turned his head to look at the old neighbor. “Old Jiang, how come there is a young girl in your house?” After he said that, he suddenly realized, “Oh, it must be the child of your relatives. This is rare. I haven’t seen your relatives come to live in your house yet.”
Jiang Zhonglin didn’t know what to say, so he got up and took a pair of slippers for Yu Yao to wear.
The strange old man was watching happily and suddenly saw the young girl put on the slippers that Lao Jiang had taken and take a step forward and kiss Lao Jiang on the face.
“Hello, my name is Yu Yao, and I’m his wife.” The young girl said.
*****
What should I do if my lover became an old man after traveling to fourty years later? Chapter List:
0 comment:
Post a Comment
Be polite, and no rude or insulting comments, please...