The past two days I’ve been doing everything in a muddle, my neck trouble leaving me a little rattled, so I’ve taken to pretending I’m some great hero out of a wuxia novel, pressing acupoints to dissolve the pain. At my age my thoughts have grown rather tangled, and it seems this is the only way I can accept the “pleasure” of pain that heaven has given me. Love and hatred are probably the same — long since no longer things this numbed-out self of mine can possess, and pressing acupoints won’t help with those either. To borrow Duras’s words, the Stendhalian, the Balzacian, even the Proustian kind of love story — all of that has already become the past.

But I keep thinking: a person without feeling is really as strange as a pair of boys’ underwear missing the smell it ought to have. Everything I’ve been going through lately has brought the word “dream” to mind — I haven’t mentioned it in so many years, haven’t even thought it through carefully. I used to write essays about things like this, and they were all fake — what does it matter if you dreamed it, if you imagined it? After all, this reality where dream and truth can’t be told apart is just that objective — even a turd has to be pulled out through your own body.

My earliest, truest dream was to be someone who travels everywhere, wandering more of our earth, and then dying once I’d grown too old to walk further. Accomplishing nothing wouldn’t drag anyone else down with me — I think if a person has successfully sorted out eating, drinking, and sex, then they qualify as an adult. What I hate most is any collective, institution, or authority presuming to judge or define whether a person counts as a success or a failure. Still, thinking it over and over, there’s some ambition left in my heart after all, and some things I can’t help being tied to.

Maybe it really is just a coincidence, but several old friends have lately been telling me about opening their own little shops. How nice, to have a little shop — it would seem to be your entire world. This has tugged at my own fantasies too — what if I had a little shop someday… It would be a conceptual kind of storefront, the kind that makes you feel at home, or maybe the shop’s name would simply be “feel like home.” Warm colors, fashionable décor — I’d sell things by day and sleep in the shop at night. Let’s say it’s in Chengdu, where it drizzles a little bit every day.

(several hundred words omitted here..)

Ah, wasn’t I talking about ideals? How did my consciousness drift off into fantasy again — am I really unable to escape stream of consciousness? After all, fantasy can’t help me actually live, unless I become a writer and write books? Right, write books. If that were real, I suppose I’d have to go down that path of mixed praise and blame, even more blame than praise… and later a reader would show up, supporting me against the pressure of convention, and I’d be so moved, and later we’d commit suicide together, bringing my legendary life to its end.

Ha ha ha, has pain really become some kind of hallucinogen? Oh right, what should my little shop sell? I’ll just set out a cabinet with a hundred eyes, each holding some flavor of human feeling — one eye, one taste, each utterly different from the next. Dear customer, do you carry some secret ache from your youth? Come on in.