Pain at the threshold of love

Author: He Jingcong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Please allow me to dedicate this book to all my loved ones—because of your presence, my heart’s beautiful love has been able to flourish and express itself, making me feel so fortunate to live in such a happy world! Please allow me to dedicate this book to all those who love in their hearts—because of your love, the flow of time has become so passionate and wonderful; it has allowed me to realize that the beautiful flower of life is so diverse! I wish to share my entire sincerity and passion with you, hoping that by chance, we may collide and resonate with each other’s hearts; and I also hope that such sincerity and passion can, at least partially, compensate for my shallow knowledge and clumsy skills, allowing us to transcend them and hear the voice that flows naturally from the depths of our hearts.
On a weekend evening, I was restless, anxious, waiting for an unknown phone call, unable to shake off the worries no matter how many excuses I made. Just then, at the author’s invitation, I read a book that was still on her laptop at the time. I came across a story about "unfinished,"—the story of a woman who prepared countless excuses for her loved one and happily continued her dream. Her happiness infected me, and through her, I saw my own happiness. In happiness, I was no longer alone. When our hearts are filled with happiness, loneliness becomes a kind of beauty. The desire for love is instinctive, and loneliness is too. We instinctively feel lonely, and we instinctively long to be loved. Because of the fear of loneliness, because of the desire for love, we hide our stories, never mentioning certain details—details where I am unlucky, greedy, dirty, cowardly, cruel, how I am, foolish, immoral—details that would make my family dislike me, my loved ones resent me, my friends distance themselves, my colleagues criticize me, and passersby mock me—people would no longer love me as they do now, and I would be alone—so, we must hide the "me."
Hiding our stories, we read others’, sitting comfortably in front of books, newspapers, the internet, screens, and curtains, judging every character in every scene of the stories, loving them, hating them, admiring them, resenting them. No matter whether we ultimately rate the story as excellent, good, average, poor, or failing, we cannot deny that at least for a few minutes, we feel: "Here, it seems so familiar, as if I have been somewhere before, as if I have met someone before, as if I have said something before or hesitated to say it, as if someone has once done something to me or something I have never received." I believe that if a story touches you, it is your emotional memory that is being touched. What moves people is not "what has never existed," but "what has once existed."