SickHome
"Nothing really changes," I tiptoed out of the hotel room door and moved towards the dark emergency exit. It wasn't until my vision went completely black that I realized I had stopped breathing at some point. I gasped for air, oblivious to the fact that the starry sky had already filled the entire staircase and entered my nostrils.
In the winter of my 22nd year, I look back at some of the essays I've written. "During my rebellious phase, I didn't like visiting ancient towns at all. What's so special about the Jiuzhaigou waterfall? Isn't the Leshan Giant Buddha just a statue? I did my best not to take pictures, not to create these so-called 'memories.' But when I started to appreciate the magnificent beauty of these natural landscapes, I couldn't find the opportunity to travel with my family anymore." I don't know when it started, but my photo album slowly began to feature my selfies, some group photos, and you can even see me posting these photos in group chats and on my Moments.
I seem to have gotten a little carried away. I secretly bought a plane ticket home after watching the major, and when my sister invited me to travel with my grandma and the others, I readily agreed. I thought that at 22, after experiencing a so-called "transformation" in 2023, I could easily handle this once-tricky issue.
A feeling of suffocation. I like to sit by the window on the plane. Today, Kunming has a clear sky, and I can see that piece of land at a glance. After being away for almost a year, the joy of returning home was about to overflow from me, but a sense of disgust enveloped the entire plane the moment I saw that land. It seeped into my body from the air conditioning vents above the seats, from the holes in the windows, from the plane's exit to the cargo hold, leaving no crevice untouched. It muddled the pressure in the cabin, making my mind a little fuzzy. In this moment that should have been filled with the joy of returning home, an inappropriate thought appeared: "Why am I back again?"
I suddenly regretted these decisions. I regretted secretly buying a plane ticket home to surprise my family; I regretted readily accepting the invitation to travel to Xishuangbanna with my uncle, sister, and grandma. "Maybe I could have gone back before the Spring Festival, or maybe I could have just said I was busy with 'research' and not gone back at all, which would have saved money."
But it was too late. I paid the price for my complacency. I boarded the high-speed train to Xishuangbanna.
Everyone I met on that land seemed to hold malice towards me, or perhaps I showed malice towards them. On the high-speed train, I was already annoyed by the lack of space for my luggage, and then someone took my seat. I preemptively assumed he was a seat-stealer and angrily confronted him, only to find out that I had changed my ticket to a better seat in the app and had overlooked it because I hadn't updated my itinerary. The train started moving towards Xishuangbanna, and I was alone, dragging my suitcase and backpack, slowly walking towards the carriage in the opposite direction of travel. I wanted to walk faster, but I soon realized that I couldn't escape that train. I was already imprisoned by that land.
In a daze, I found myself having dinner with the relatives I was traveling with. They were chatting about the itinerary for the next few days, and I was just going along with it. It wasn't until after dinner, on the way back to the hotel, that I suddenly woke up. A wave of palpitations brought me back to my senses. I licked my lips, but I couldn't describe it—it tasted of a hundred flavors, but unfortunately, I could only taste one: a sense of not belonging. My thoughts were still wandering, and I suddenly realized that I had experienced this kind of palpitation many times before, and they had always occurred when I was traveling with my family, when I was feeling down and walking alone on the road.
In those times, I always had a way to relieve this palpitation. I might walk alone by the river, listening to music and drinking beer. Or I would turn on a camera and talk to myself on the other side of the screen about what had been happening recently. But this time, on that land, I didn't have the right to do so.
So I wrote this article. When I came to my senses and looked around, I found that the starlight that had accompanied me on my way here no longer deigned to be with me. It had summoned a dark cloud to wrap up my shadow, dragging me along with it into the darkness.
I stood up. Because of my complacency, I walked towards the bright corridor. He gently pushed open the door and became another person that this land liked.
This Content is generated by LLM and might be wrong / incomplete, refer to Chinese version if you find something wrong.