Three in the Moonlight

“A 53-year-old childless cat lady regrets it, twenty years too late” — Bilibili

Students cannot understand this kind of urban loneliness. There are classmates when you go out and parents when you go home. But when you move to a big city alone for work, with no familiar face anywhere, your phone rings only for spam or work. Loneliness crawls out from all four walls like woodworm and leaves you shivering.

You are against marriage and children, and firmly live by that conviction. You were happy enough in earlier years, but this year you turned thirty, and something seems to have shifted…

You have a few close colleagues, but they already have lives of their own. Games and television shows—ten, a hundred, a thousand of them—eventually offer no more than that. What can you do alone on a shopping trip? You dare not order too much at a restaurant, and a beautiful place without a single person is called a nature reserve.

Worst of all, even the goofy friends in your always-available online group do not start a discussion whenever you say something. Newcomers have replaced old faces, and you can no longer keep up with the topics of young people today. You begin to understand that you are not the center of the world. No spotlight will turn toward you; no one will care about your insignificant life.

Work brings no less pressure. Like the deranged pool manager in a school word problem, you let water out on one side while work pumps it in on the other. The drainpipe grows narrower, the pump grows wider, and the water keeps rising. You begin to wish someone would contact you outside work. Anyone. Even just for a conversation.

Family cares because they are family, classmates because they are nearby, teachers because it is their duty, and the news because you are young.

After that, no one cares about you anymore. Your happiness has no one to share it with, your sorrow no one to hear, and your pain no one to shoulder. Your five-person game team is never complete; at the cinema you always buy one ticket. You even wonder whether, if you died unexpectedly in your rented apartment, the next person to notice would do so only because the loneliness rotting inside you had begun to smell.

Your freedom and easygoing independence, the decisiveness with which you once believed death preferable to bondage—like a fish falling into the sky or a falcon plunging into the sea. Looking up at the vastness of the world, where is “home”?

The ancients had a peculiar feeling about demotion and exile, because exile reset a person’s social ties, leaving them with no familiar face in a remote land. It is like having your QQ and WeChat accounts suddenly banned—a crushing blow to a social animal.

Su Shi was exiled to Huangzhou for four years. In the fourth year, Zhang Huaimin was also banished there. “Huaimin, too, had not yet gone to sleep”: one, long exiled, worried that his old friend would not adapt; the other, newly arrived, could not sleep. These fellow sufferers walked together to tour Chengtian Temple by night. What did they think about that night? Whatever the thoughts, two lonely people must have carried a thousand emotions between them.

Lingnan was once said to be plagued by miasma and insects. Su Shi was exiled there again at fifty-seven and walked 1,500 li to get there. Still, he left behind a poem:

Beneath Mount Luofu, spring lasts through all four seasons; loquats and waxberries ripen one after another.

I eat three hundred lychees a day, and do not mind remaining a man of Lingnan forever.

But if I were past fifty, even standing alone amid the crowds of Shenzhen, would I still feel the liveliness? I doubt it. This is Lingnan, and I too have been exiled.

Most of us cannot remain in Shenzhen. We drift back to our hometowns and feel—

I left home young and return old; my accent is unchanged, though my hair has thinned.

The children see me but do not recognize me, and laughingly ask, “Where does this traveler come from?”

That almost-familiar feeling makes you a familiar stranger in the small city you call home.

At midnight, in a huge bed, a tiny you curls up with your back hunched. Thick darkness carries a piercing loneliness around you. The distant mechanical noise of a factory, borne on the cold wind, rings out. It is the heartbeat of night, the echo of loneliness.

You return to childhood, sleeping alone while your parents worked the night shift. The difference is that back then you still waited for them to come home. Now you endure this torment night after night, every night…

You are thirty; your parents are fifty. If they live to eighty, thirty years sounds long—but if you go home once each year for National Day and Spring Festival, that is sixty more meetings. May everyone’s parents live to a hundred; whatever the outcome, time flows on, day and night never stopping.

On New Year’s Eve, everywhere is bright with celebration. The countdown ends and firecrackers erupt. You look at Shanghai streets and Shenzhen lanes on your phone: people packed everywhere. The liveliness belongs to them; you have nothing. Friends turn down your invitations with every possible excuse.

Watching fireworks through the glass, you cannot tell whether the thunder is outside or inside your heart. The apartment you chose because one person would have plenty of room now echoes with emptiness. When the sounds fade, loneliness spreads through your bones. On the large sofa bought for friends, an empty seat seems to breathe cold air. You wrap yourself in your coat again and again, but the chill will not leave.

The next year’s news still reports record-low birth rates and record-high numbers of lonely deaths. Sitting on a park bench, you hear young people chattering in the distance—

“I’m never getting married, and I don’t want children either. How happy it is to be alone!”

…

You shake your head. It seems another cycle has begun.