Kingyo in the Park

Tonight, I went to a Sichuan restaurant with my friend Song. It had been a few months since we had last eaten Chinese food together at a restaurant. Unlike the older decorated restaurants in Chinatown, this one was decorated like a Chinese mall food court, and the owner was probably a newcomer to London.

Because we didn't make a reservation in advance, the waiter led us to a small sunken space inside the restaurant. There were no windows, and the walls were painted a deep green. There were four small tables, and one of them was occupied by two young men who looked about our age.

Those two guys were discussing work, entrepreneurship, and future development. Song and I also talked about whether we should go back to China or continue to stay in London. She described how she wanted to redecorate her home, open a studio, a vintage clothing store, make porcelain in Jingdezhen, and continue playing in a band... I envied her, and I wanted to see what she would look like five years from now. Not because I envied her ability to do things, but because I envied the way she could still live like the characters in Chekhov's plays, full of hope for the future in the first act, while I was just a blank slate. I could only stand on the edge, hesitating, unsure whether to move forward or backward.

Because we were sitting too close to the table behind us, my brain involuntarily absorbed their conversation, and my mouth also involuntarily asked them similar questions, until the third and fourth tables in the room were occupied.

The Sichuan-style fish cooked in sour soup with vine pepper we ordered had a strong fishy smell, so the waiter took it away and didn't bring out the next dish for a while. We finished the two small dishes we ordered, leaving the table empty, while the noise in the small room only grew louder.

Song said that whenever she thought of some of her good friends from junior high school and high school, she would feel at ease when she returned to Shijiazhuang and they were still there. But I couldn't think of such people for a while. Before high school, I had always moved with my mother. Although we were not wealthy, I always went to private school. Among my classmates, there were few truly free spirits. Many suddenly transformed into snobbish princesses who scorned the less fortunate. I never had any friends who stuck with me from childhood to adulthood. In just half an hour, it felt like the past ten years had been turned upside down.

I turned my head to the lady on the left wearing a beige coat and red shiny Carel shoes and said to Song, "I want to skip directly to 40 years old" and have that kind of peace, comfort, and calmness.

As we walked out of the restaurant, I still couldn't recover from the feeling of falling into a time hole. But I knew that this feeling would dissipate as soon as I went back to school tomorrow, so as soon as I got home, I picked up a pen and wrote it all down.