Last night, maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was being stuck in dorm isolation for too long, but I suddenly fell into that heavy, familiar mood.
Yes—just like that, out of nowhere.
So I decided to listen to music, which was honestly a stupid idea. The more I listened, the worse it got.
I felt impatient with everything. I just wanted the alcohol to numb me enough to fall asleep properly. Unfortunately, the drink was awful. It was really awful. Then again, when a bottle costs less than 20 yuan, there is only so much you can expect from it.
Out of boredom, I clicked through sites like Ten-Year Pact and Travelling to the Wormhole a few times, drifting into strangers' blogs and reading bits of other people's stories. After a while I didn't even want to keep reading. I just sat there doing pointless little things in silence. People really are complicated creatures.
Last year I had every intention of seriously studying networking courses, maybe becoming better as a network engineer. I did learn some things, but after a certain point it started to feel unnecessary, so I stopped. What I had already learned was enough for practical use anyway. In a small place like ours, a lot of that knowledge never really gets applied, and the cost of the equipment alone is enough to make many companies give up on it.
Maybe part of it is age too. You watch the people around you achieve things, more or less, while you seem to stay the same year after year. Little by little, you start lying flat. I have been at this company for six years now. Back when I first graduated, I was young, full of energy, convinced I was going to do something with myself. Now my child is already two years old. I don't have the same urge to keep tossing myself into things. If I get some free time, going home to see my kid feels pretty good.
And still, there is some unwillingness left in me. After all these years doing technical work, I still expect something from myself. Having one more skill means living a little more securely. At the very least, it means not spending your whole life doing the same repetitive tasks.
That wasn't even what I originally meant to write about. What set all this off was seeing QQ logged in on my computer. I looked through my friends list and realized almost nobody is online anymore. QQ carried so much of life for people of our generation. It recorded our school years, our first loves, our diaries, the things we wrote when we were young. My own Qzone, more than anything, recorded the road she and I walked together.
As it happened, the 11th of this month was our tenth anniversary. Because of pandemic isolation, I didn't even realize it until three days later. That really hurt. Ten years of knowing someone is no small thing.
The moment I opened Qzone, the homepage was still carrying the same line:
"When all the splendor is gone, what remains is only a trace of sorrow."
I think I wrote that after a class reunion. I had drunk quite a bit that night and was walking through the streets, looking at the city as it was then, and that sentence just came out of me.
The page itself was still simple. All the flashy decorations were gone. Things like Flash had long since reached the end of their life anyway.
Then I opened the friends feed. Hardly anyone updates their posts there anymore. These days most people's social activity has moved elsewhere, and it feels like everyone abandoned QQ all at once sometime after that one summer. Even the people in my special-care list hadn't posted in ages. The whole place felt deserted.
I used to post a lot more than most people, but I vaguely remembered that around graduation I had cleaned out my Qzone and left behind only a small number of posts—just enough to suggest that I had once been active there. Deleting everything took a long time. In a way, it felt like saying goodbye. After scrolling for ages, this was probably the oldest post I could still find. It looked embarrassingly dramatic, exactly the kind of thing that seemed profound back then.
The feature I probably used the longest was the photo album. That part really carried a lot. Back in those years, whenever I took a decent picture, I would make a few quick edits and upload it to my Qzone album. Those albums documented my classmates, and they documented these ten years with her too. A lot of them are private now. We were so young then. I was only 110 jin at the time; now I'm already up to 190. Somewhere along the way I went from a guy in his early twenties to someone approaching thirty and awkwardly trying to joke that he's an "old young man."
People from that era also seemed to love writing logs in Qzone. That was actually what I deleted the most. I used to repost a lot, and I wrote a lot too. I still remember how exhausting it was the night I cleaned them out. Those logs felt a lot like blogging—almost the same as keeping posts on a personal blog. That kind of platform had its own era: Sina Blog, Baidu Space, all of them. Over time they slowly faded from view. There are only a few logs left now, and even those are hidden, as if I had never written them at all.
But while digging around, I found something unexpected: private diaries. I entered the default password and, to my surprise, there were more than a thousand entries. It seems I had switched almost all of them to private back then. I spent a long time going through them. Some were clearly things I had written myself. I sent a few to my wife, and she replied with one sentence: back then we were young and didn't know any better.
Looking at them now, I really was naive. Probably childish too. But they are still proof of what love looked like back then. Young love really was beautiful. Life had not wrapped itself around everything yet.
There were also a few old pieces of writing left below. Reading them now was enough to make me laugh at myself.
Maybe that is what getting older feels like. You think you are just opening an old social profile, but what actually opens is a sealed room full of old moods, unfinished ambitions, love that has lasted long enough to become family, and a version of yourself that now feels both embarrassing and precious.
I hope everyone gets to keep some of that, and I hope life turns out gently for you.