That whistle always hurts time. It scratches our days. It is sharper than our rusty kitchen knife. My parents like to hide all sharp things out of our reach, but they can't hide their whistles. My time and my family's time were cut into pieces by the whistle. Compared with the harsh whistle, the sound of the big iron bell in the village is much softer. It "thunk-thunk-thunk", with a long voice, a pause, a pause, and a leisurely pace, as if waiting for someone to catch up. It sounds like the barking of an old dog who hasn't had enough to eat, or the dumb cry of a sick donkey. It's a little out of breath.
I'm afraid to listen to the footsteps of time. In my environment, there is no clock ticking, I can't see the time walking, and all the windows are covered with thick curtains, so I keep all the interference out of the curtains. My door is always closed, refusing any intrusion and cutting. I like to cook time into chunks of delicious food by myself. Like a greedy cook, I hate making all the stored things into a ball and always try to avoid sharp things like knives and scissors. I like to keep it for a whole time. I can't stop playing with something, such as a button, an eraser, or a rusty hoop. I touched my hand over and over again and stared at it for a while. I avoid all external things to interfere with them: sound, wind and light, which will remind people of the existence and walking of time. A time to reject sound, wind and light is relatively static, at least for me.
Where there is light, it will cast the shadow of time. I like to see the shadows in the morning, which are long and high, and lengthen the time for a long time. It's the kind of length that makes people feel very safe. It's longer than that whistle, so people don't have to worry about anything short to cut it off. I don't want to run too fast in the face of long shadows. That whistle is far from such a long shadow. You can rest assured to wash your face in the ditch, urinate leisurely in the sunflower field in front of your door, take a bundle of firewood to boil the water in the pot, sprinkle a handful of poria tea in it, cover the lid and cook it, then push open the fence door of the sheepfold, grab a ewe and squeeze a bowl of goat's milk, pour it into a hot pot, break a dry naan and dip it in milk tea.
Most of the time, pulling weeds until it gets dark in the afternoon, and when I come back, I sit on the kang and take a nap, picking noodles and melon seeds or rubbing corn, so I am too tired to get up at night. The next day, I opened my eyes and it was sunny. I got up to air the mattress. I saw the shadow of the sun on the wall was very short, as if it had been cut off while I was asleep. I am anxious to cry. Time is like the urine I pee on the mattress, leaving only dry marks. That damn whistle, it happened that at this time, the sound of "Shu" cut the slope of the girder and scratched my low-paid eyebrow face. Facing the sharp whistle like a blade, I ran after my shorter shadow, feeling thinner and thinner, like a piece of paper, and any gust of wind could blow me away.
I wish I had disappeared, so I wouldn't have to fly over the big beam slope, cross the old river dam, cross the small ditch, rush to the classroom again and again, and fall at the door of the classroom like a big stone. All eyes turned to me, and all faces were the common disdain of astonishment and understatement, and then they were rejected. Countless times, I was always blocked out of other people's time because I was late. At that time, everyone's eyes were blind, and only I clearly saw the existence of time. I see that time is like a page, turned over by one immature hand after another. Those days are lost from the innocent children's voices, strung together like soap bubbles in the sun, blown into powder before my eyes and floated outside the classroom to chase the short whistle after class.
During the winter vacation and summer vacation, the whistle was temporarily hidden. I put on my pants and ran out to see the sun shadow in the morning without coming together. When I woke up at noon, I stood in the yard, standing on the head of the shadow, feeling that I had been stepped on, as if I had finally defeated the troublemaker who loved to bully me next door, and I felt a sense of revenge in my heart.
Stepping on my own shadow in the snow in winter, I like to rub my feet in the Zita Law. The little yellow dog running with me also turned and chased his shadow rolling on the ground. It beat the shadow with its tail and tried to sweep it away. As a result, it dug a snow pit in the snow, and the shadow was still firmly stuck in the snow pit. Little yellow dog flustered and frustratedly buried the snow pit with its claws, trying to level it with its tail in the snow and bury it. Shadow from shallow to deep, from deep to shallow, just like little yellow dog joking. The little yellow dog's shadow fluttered in the snow for a while, and then ran away with his master, leaving me alone in the snow, staring at the shadow at my feet.
You can avoid the whistle for a longer period of time in the summer vacation, but you can't avoid the shadow. I watched the shadow change constantly: in the safflower field, it smelled of safflower and reflected on the broken leaves and stamens of safflower; In the corn field, it is entangled with the stems and leaves of corn and shakes in the sun. On the sandy road, it echoes the sparse reeds on the roadside, and the sparse hair on its head flutters like a reed tassel ... It always reminds me that there is something parallel to me, and I can't escape, and nothing can escape. This reminds me of the whistle that is temporarily hidden aside, and always blows when a shadow comes. This makes me feel uneasy during the long summer vacation, a kind of uneasiness being chased by unknown things.
I'm not only afraid of shadows, but also of light. I like to hide in the dark in broad daylight. I nailed three nails on a table with three drawers at home, hung a cloth curtain, put a sack under my body and got into the curtain to lie down. From the inside of the curtain, the butterfly on the cloth is still, the flowers on the cloth are still, and there is no wind or sound in the room. The light through the cloth became so dim that I couldn't project my shadow on the wall at all, which made me feel at ease. When my family pushed the door in and rummaged through the drawers, I saw their feet moving under the curtains, coming and going out, and then the door slammed, and I felt that I was shut out of time again. When I turned to the last pages of a brick-like novel, the words in that book began to melt and disappear before my eyes. I rubbed my eyes and woke up from a big dream. I opened the curtains and ran into the yard. I found it was dark and the moon was rising from the top of the poplar tree. There was no one in the yard, and my father called my nickname in the distant field, one by one. I ran to the sound. The shadow of my running was pulled by the moonlight for a long time. On my side, the shadow running posture is like the dance of the soul, which is so unreal.
The story my father told us began with Once upon a time. The former prince was as handsome as him, and the former princess was as beautiful as her. No one can prove it through the "past", preferring to believe that everything is as it was. I just know that in all the "past", the beauty is always time. The lost time, all the "past", shows the beauty that time cannot reproduce and imagine. We care about some things that we used to have, but we are actually carefully caring about and retaining time.
Dad's time stopped after he arrived at Daliangpo, and his past time became the past. There is his old Roman watch in the drawer. The numbers on those watches are beautiful. Roman numerals are made of thin metal wires as soft as cotton thread and as elastic as precision springs. In our family, that beautiful watch is just a decoration, not even a decoration. It is kept in a drawer year after year. It is estimated that even the watch itself no longer thinks it is an instrument for measuring time. Gradually ignored in time, slowly rusted in neglected time.
As a decoration, it is another clock in our house. It has a square crystal transparent shell, in which you can clearly see the spring, gear and all parts. As long as I can remember, the gears of those times have not turned. Even though I tried my best to wind up the spring, the three slender hands were fixed in a fixed position. I wonder if the time it shows is still meaningful. Is it morning or evening? In short, it stopped. That time must be a very important time for it, but in our family, no one will remember the time when it stopped. Now the time it shows has nothing to do with anyone, so we don't have to be afraid of it at all. It is always thrown around by my brother and me. Obviously, for us, it is at least a very strong and beautiful crystal toy.
Daliangpo doesn't need clocks, and everything almost stops. So dad kept talking until he died, saying that he would polish a pair of crystal glasses with the crystal shell of that clock. Maybe he feels old and his eyes are getting worse. I'm afraid he wants to see his days and a handful of time more clearly. He may have found that the time of death of the crystal watch is an illusion. Time won't stop because of that watch, but dad is bound to usher in his old age.
At that time, when we were young, we liked to look for traces of the passage of time everywhere and didn't care about the passage of time. Many times, my brother and I like to lie on the kang, and recognize the slow flow of time and the position of the sun in the sky from the light beam irradiated by the skylight, from the small floating dust flying up and down, and from the movement of the sun shadow projected on the wall by the skylight. The time of Daliangpo is rough and primitive, rough enough to be ignored, and primitive enough to be stagnant. The world is in no hurry. If it weren't for whistles, shadows, day and night reminders, careless reminders from tweeters and the "last ring just now" on the radio, and the big iron bell of Daliangpo, which knocks whenever it wants and is silent when no one knocks, it would almost be forgotten by time. Even for a few years, it seems that there are only two seasons in a year. The middle season is vague and the first season is ignored. Even so, no one will think there is anything wrong with this day. In such a slow life, you can catch up with yesterday and earlier at any time. People have plenty of time to wait, for example, a cool breeze dries sweat, for example, a rain wets the ground, for example, flowers bloom and fall, the moon sets and the sun rises. An old man came to the end of time, and another child was sent away by time. Life rarely misses anything. If you lose a cow today, you can ride out tomorrow, and you can still lose the cow before dark.
"Di-the last sound just now was 12 in Xinjiang time ..." Every time I hear the whole hour on the radio, it reminds me of a radio drama "The Last Leaf" that I have heard countless times. At the end of the play, the painter painted a green leaf on the wall. The next day, the sick heroine woke up and saw that the last leaf symbolizing life was still on the wall. She miraculously recovered from her illness, but the painter who painted leaves died the night before.
Everything now will be a thing of the past, and we don't have to be sad. Everything is lost in time, and no one is spared. We are just shadows, walking meaningless in time. When we open our eyes to see the world every morning, some lives are actually passing away, and we fall asleep unconsciously. We are empty-handed, because time is the only gift.