I came across a caption on Douyin that stayed with me. It said something like this: you wreck yourself in the years when you don't know any better, then make yourself miserable in the years when you do. Regret trails every step. You pretend you've cleared a hundred hurdles, and you look happy enough, but only you know how hard some of those hurdles really were. One comment underneath put it better than I could: not one line mentioned me, yet every line was mine. I am paying now for the ignorance of my younger self. I am tired.
The summer cicadas that scattered in the wind, the adolescent worries soaked by rain—they have all become tender places I keep touching in the middle of the night. I brewed regret into moonlight, but it never lit the way back. I folded remorse into paper boats, but they never reached the far bank of memory. Each step felt like walking across a thorny waste, and inside those bloody footprints were countless dawns in which I wanted to start over.
Later I learned to swallow broken glass while smiling in a crowd, to pin my scars to my sleeve like medals. But when dusk spreads across the window, the pain that time had sealed up turns into a tide and spills over the bank of my heart. I count the grooves in my palm. Every crease is a wound that never closed; every line is carved with 'if only.'
Then one day I saw the fine lines at the corners of my eyes in the mirror and understood something: a life is a piece of porcelain with cracks in it. We fill the cracks with tears and glaze them with smiles. Then, in some pale morning light, we discover that a new spring has grown out of those cracks—except the spring is always behind glass. I can see the flowers opening. I cannot feel their warmth.
The lamps I put out with my own hands now burn behind me like will-o'-the-wisps. I stand in the ruins of time and watch countless 'ifs' flicker in the fog. I still cannot cross the gap called 'already.'