The Spirit World

Chapter 646: The Sky is Wide and the Sea is Vast
Moon, moon, why can't you take away my sadness?

In the first grade when my mother left me, I realized one thing: I no longer had the right to see my father.

I didn't want to see him at first, because as soon as I saw him, I would miss my mother so much that I would feel unbearable.

I live in a small courtyard. A high red wall blocks my youth, and the veil becomes heavier and heavier, making it hard for me to breathe.

On days when no one is around to check on me, I take it off and look out the small window at the blue sky that I can no longer embrace...

When seeing the blue sky and white clouds becomes a luxury, where will the blue sky and white clouds that belong to me be? Maybe they will never exist.

I think about everything about my future, but it's always blank. In this white world, perhaps everything about me should also be blank.

I will marry a man I have never met, who may be like my father, someone I don't want to see again.

I thought about my mother, perhaps it was the same, hiding her whole life within these high walls, and letting her youth disappear with the passage of time, in my father's harsh scolding, in my father's cold eyes, and in the eyes of my father's cruel new love.

Whenever I think of this, I feel my mother's loneliness, and I feel my longing for my mother in this world.

Many years later, in the tall loess, the bamboo hat and veil that accompanied my mother in her youth should have disappeared, but my mother's passing has also become a lifelong hatred for me.

However, when I realized the burden I had brought to my mother, this hatred kept hitting me all the time.

I am not a man, but a woman.

Because she is a girl, she cannot read and write like boys. Because she is a girl, she cannot fight on the battlefield like boys. Because she is a girl, she cannot face the raging fire and rolling thunder.

My father only liked his sons. They were my brothers, but I had never seen most of them. Only my second brother often came to see me.

He always wore a white robe with a beautiful [Blue Dragon] badge on it, which was sewn by my mother. The blue thread and the white thread were always with me, strung together by my mother's hands. Sometimes, I watched them being woven into a family emblem by my mother's hands, and that period of time began to be broken into pieces in my mind.

I have a clear dream that the green dragon will come to me, take me flying, and let me see the blue sky and white clouds outside. After living for so long, I also vaguely understand what I mean to my mother.

However, all my father's sons, all my brothers and sisters, were not born to my mother. When they saw me, they just looked at my mother and called her indifferently, even coldly... Mother. Then they looked at me, as if they were looking at a very novel toy.

Every brother has a different expression when he sees me.

When my elder brother sees me, he will look at me calmly.

When my second brother meets me, he will gently touch my head and smile.

When my third brother sees me, he stares at me with his beautiful eyes.

Fourth brother, I have never seen him look me in the eye.

They were all my father's sons, but never my mother's children.

Only I am my mother's daughter.

My second brother was good to me, and it was obvious to the naked eye. He was close to me, played with me, and told me stories.

When he came to see me, he would always stand by the high wall, raise his head, slowly raise his head, look at the birds flying in the sky, and sing hymns for me in a deep and melancholy voice.

"The Chu sky is three miles wide, and the Qinghai Sea is a hundred feet wide
If you want to make a fresh start, you need to climb the green mountains.”

He didn't write poems like this on a normal day. Maybe it was to take care of me, a little kid - his non-blood-related sister. I could understand the poems he sang and what he was thinking.

I can only enjoy a little of the sky here, which is less than three miles wide. But in the world outside the high walls, there is a green ocean that is a hundred feet wide.

If you want to see the blue ocean, you must climb over the mountains and jump over the cliffs to see the blue mountains. Beyond the blue mountains is the ocean. I have never seen the blue ocean, but I have seen the blue mountains. My second brother told me that the ocean is beyond the mountains.

But I have never been to Qingshan, nor have I ever seen that sea.

Perhaps, I have never even owned this three-mile sky.

How can I expect that? Even in the ocean that is a hundred feet wide, there is hardly a puddle that belongs to me.

But my second brother told me that as long as I went looking for it, I would definitely be able to see the blue ocean. He called me Lan'er, calling me by my nickname. He put his hand on my head and told me softly.

"Lan'er, Lan'er, please don't blame your mother. And please don't blame your father either."

I didn't understand why he said that, how could I not hate my father, I looked at him angrily and pushed his hand away.

"Second brother! Idiot! Stupid! Idiot!"

"Lan'er... Lan'er... He is our father after all. He loves mother very much, but he just can't love her. He loves you very much, but he just can't love you..."

My second brother’s words made me angry. I really didn’t understand how much praise my second brother had received from my father to make him say such things.

"jerk!"

I scolded him and pushed him away.

He looked at me quietly. I had never thought that his eyes were as beautiful as those of my third brother. From that moment on, I felt that he quietly and peacefully let me push him out of the yard.

This is still my garden.

For a second, I seemed to see my mother's figure. She stood there, looking at me quietly, looking at this unreasonable bad kid, and then told me.

"Yinglan...be good."

My second brother is not my mother's child.

But he said the same words as my mother.

My mother and my second brother both love me deeply.

The day I pushed my second brother out of the yard, I felt like I had done the most regretful thing in the world.

Of my four brothers, only my second brother would come to see me.

He heard him calling softly outside the door: "Lan'er! Please go and see that sea, and take your second brother's hope with you."

Second brother, I often think of...

His teachings to me were no less than those of my mother who didn't talk much. He taught me to read some books and learn some words. I listened to his little truths. He taught me how to write the word "love" and what I should pursue in life. He told me that I was not a girl, but a boy.

I am not a man, but a girl.

I never saw my second brother again, just like I never saw my mother again.

I heard from my fellow villagers who traveled around the world that a young man named Fei Wen'an died of tuberculosis thirty years ago...

I can no longer miss... everything about my past.

(End of this chapter)