Running away from the Love-Brain

Pessimism

David Tao sings, "Love seems like quicksand," and also, "It's a cycle of doing wrong and not being able to help it." Karen Mok sings, "What exactly is love but a mental opiate?" and also, "Or perhaps it's just a boring pastime at the end of the century." Aaron Kwok sings, "Repeatedly missing you is called love," and also, "There's no need for too many reasons to call it love..."

Cui Xijin believes they all sing too simply.

Cui Xijin's life philosophy is that the essence of humanity is just one person living. This phrase comes from One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she has taken the liberty to modify, changing "life" in the original text to "humanity."

The original text also contains a second half — do not have too many expectations of others. At the same time, she hopes that no one should have too many expectations of her. This saying can be applied to anyone, of course, including "love."

Perhaps it started in her childhood.

Cui He and Yu Hongdong had already taught her this lesson — "You should have your own judgment," "Don't always expect to get everything from others," "We are just outsiders"... They never taught her what love is; they only taught her to "take care of herself" in various intimate relationships.

She thinks of Cui He and Yu Hongdong; she believes these two people must have come together out of "love." At least, this is enough for the world to consider it a "love" that is qualified: raising two daughters, balancing their own careers, and treating each other with respect... She recalls the loving relationships she has witnessed and remembers that those who can achieve what these two have are already called models by the outside world.

But if this is already the ultimate definition of love, then love might not be something difficult to understand or worth pondering deeply.

She also remembers the news story about "a man in Chengdu who caused a car accident after a breakup," feeling that love is truly one of the most incomprehensible viruses in human history, perhaps the most difficult to decipher.

She thinks of Ran Yan and Chen Wenran, who have always been bickering and breaking up over the years. Maybe they can keep going, or maybe they will part ways again in an unknown year. Everything is uncertain; everything is unpredictable.

She doesn't like uncertain things.

She still can't find a definition for love. It is the source of everything vague and sticky; it is an invasion of another person into her life's boundaries. It can be vast or minuscule. Sometimes she thinks it's very simple; other times, she feels it's too complicated.

She doesn't understand it, so she simply rejects it.

She has thought more than once about that independent film called Lost in Love, which never made it to theaters. It's one hour and fifty-two minutes long, depicting the millennium, focusing on two female leads during their teenage years in Taiwan, capturing their youthful confusion and collisions in an island city, showing the azure sky and sea, then following them to Chengdu almost thirty years later, on a similar street, spiraling through ten or twenty years in search of their lost love... In short, the plot is somewhat messy, and the pacing is inexplicably awkward; it's no surprise it didn't become a hit.

But Cui Xijin doesn't remember how many times she has watched it.

She always goes back to the two tropical fish in it—

One yellow tropical fish wearing a black short-sleeved New Balance shirt, and the other red tropical fish wearing a white shirt with a vintage print.

The yellow tropical fish says something, and the red tropical fish replies with a bubbly sound.