The annual recaps passing through my social feed are how I realize that another year has come to an end.
I used to be someone who cared deeply about documenting life. I could remember where I had gone on any given day and which old story an encounter had stirred up. But 2023 has left me with surprisingly little sense of itself. So many impressions have already blurred; all I can do is sketch its outline.
Still, I know that this was the year in which I was most extensively connected to the world outside myself. As if trying to repay the three years that had been lost, I set out on trip after trip. I went north to Qingdao and Jinan, walking through the snow-covered grounds around Daming Lake. I went south to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, riding the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour. I went west to Chengdu and Chongqing, standing beside the autumn pools swollen by the night rain of Bashan and Jinyun.
I returned to Wuxi and looked through its neighborhoods for the vegetable-and-lard filling I had longed for, a warm flavor from childhood. I returned to Hangzhou, where I talked with friends beside West Lake about the things that had once happened there, then added new stories of our own to the same place.
This was also the year I opened myself up more bravely. I may have made more close friends than I had in all the years before. My attention reached fields I had never explored before—linguistics, anthropology, front-end development—while I studied and practiced more deeply in areas already familiar to me, including MBTI, music and literature, and urban rail transit. Gradually, I formed my own frameworks and views. It was a quiet pleasure to find that they could sometimes help friends work through the confusions they encountered on their own journeys.
I gave a great deal of time and energy to the community I love. I helped connect our poems into a trail, weaving them into a web, and found sincere friendship there in return. During my internship at a bank, I listened to colleagues talk and tried to trace the contours of their lives through their conversations. New possibilities seemed to be growing everywhere.
And yet, at some point, I realized that my connection to the real world was becoming thinner.
I am drawn to the countless threads linking one thing to another, to projecting and calculating the directions a future might take. Isn’t that, in itself, a complete experience? If so, why spend so much time and effort being carried along by a script that has already been set? For things that have nothing to do with me, perhaps I need only a result to confirm my reasoning. For things that do concern me, I have often already lived through them in my mind.
The world in 2023 also felt dark and unsettled, with no clear future in sight. I began to feel detached. I became afraid of crowded places and long queues; afraid of being swept up by dominant ideas of what is “trendy” or “viral”; afraid that someone who had not seen through the nature of something would eagerly pull me along to experience it, only for us to leave disappointed and embarrassed.
I like having a space of solitude that belongs to me. It can exist in a crowd, on the subway, or in a noisy bar. As long as my thoughts are not interrupted, I feel at ease. Alcohol, incidentally, relaxes me: when I am slightly tipsy, I can settle down to tackle difficult things without imagining too much of the trouble waiting ahead. But after being detached for too long, I suppose I need a hug—something to pull me back into this world of countless lit windows.
Only hair does not exhaust itself with inner conflict. It simply keeps growing. At the beginning of the year, mine had only reached the nape of my neck; now it has fallen past my shoulders. It has faithfully recorded the evidence of my life in this world. For that, I want to thank it.