He had planned to pick Luna up from work in the evening, go to a hotel called "Music Kitchen" for dinner, and then take a walk on Haiyun Street. If Luna wasn't tired, he would take her to the disco for a few hours, and finally send her home.
He was particularly frustrated as he stood on the sidewalk opposite Luna's company. In a large travel bag at his feet was all he had now - a few change of clothes, toiletries, a pack of Redwood cigarettes, a mail-order multi-purpose Swiss Army knife and some odds and sets.
The thought that he would board the train to the west and leave the city early tomorrow morning made his heart ache.
He had lived in the city for twenty-three years and knew it as well as the clothes he wore. He detested the ever-growing skyscrapers in the city, which were getting more and more resplendent and pretentious. And as he walked into these buildings, he often felt suffocated. So many people come and go in the mall, the waitresses have a smudged smile on their faces, and most of the goods on the shelves are all show and no substance. He had been to Luna's company a few times. A large office was divided into many small partitions, and Luna, like everyone else, was confined in that tiny space.
He had a hideous look on his face.
Luna said with a smile that night: "What's so strange about that? You know how many people want that cubicle and how many people dream of working in it." He shook his head without saying a word, knowing that Luna was telling the truth, and thus felt a bit gloomy.
He and Luna are from two different worlds. He doesn't know if working in a cubicle is what is called a city white-collar worker, but he knows that Luna's salary is high every month and that work only requires sitting in front of a computer. She could dress herself up every day in the most fashionable clothes, and go to beauty salons and gyms, bars and discos in her spare time. This lifestyle really seduced him at first, and with Luna's encouragement, he tried to step into it too. But it wasn't long before he realized deeply that you could never enter a world that wasn't yours.
It's a real world that sets the course of life for everyone, and you have to endure too much hardship and suffering to go beyond this order of life.
Luna initially tried to introduce him to her circle of friends, but each time he would do some inappropriate behavior, Luna didn't take it to heart, but he couldn't stand it first.
"We live in different worlds, and our meeting is just the occasional intersection of two straight lines." "Perhaps I'll never get into your world," he said painfully. "What does it matter? Everyone has their own way of life. Just be happy." Luna still said with a smile, "Since you can't get into my world, then I'll get into yours." What is his world?
It was the first time he took Luna to that rooftop. Standing at a high place in the city, the city's scenery was all in view. The layout of the city was obvious. The eastern part of the city was backed by a not-so-high mountain range, and as far as the eye could see, there were rows of tall buildings, which, in the afterglow of the setting sun, were like a group of well-dressed noblewomen flaunting the charm of the city. The crisscrossing roads are like taut ribbons, looking bleak white and majestic at any time; In the northwest of the city, old tube-shaped houses and old bungalows are piled up haphazardly. Through the vicissitudes of time, they have lost their color, showing shades of gloom. The alleys crisscrossing them are like a bunch of blood vessels, chaotic yet interconnected.
He pointed at the alleys and said, "That's where I grew up." His father was a drunkard, and his memory was the crisp sound of him coming home late at night, knocking over a porcelain basin in the yard, and his endless quarrels and battles with his mother. At that time, whenever his father beat his mother, he would get used to sneaking into the yard alone, listening to his father's curses and his mother's weeping, and crouching timidly behind an old gardenia tree.
The gardenia tree had grown in the yard since he could remember, and before he was sixteen, its branches and leaves were taller than his height. The gardenia was one of the best memories of his childhood, and he remembered that every summer morning, the white flowers would be dotted among the green leaves, and the strong fragrance would fill the yard. On summer mornings, he often picked lots of gardenias and hid them in his schoolbag to take to school, and the proudest girls in the class would smile at him because of the gardenias.
Luna didn't like gardenias because every summer morning, there were always some suburban women hawking the cheap flower at the street corner. Everyone in the city can buy a few for a few cents and pin them around the collar or on the chest. Luna is a person who seeks to be different, so she doesn't care to have gardenias in her life. If she wanted flowers, she would ask him to accompany her to the flower shop and buy expensive carnations, calla lilies, lilies and flowers he couldn't name.
The difference between him and Luna is reflected in many details of life.
The gardenia tree vanished the year he graduated from high school. When he returned home, he saw that the place where the gardenia tree used to be was left with only a big pit, and there was still some uncleaned soil around it. The father sold the gardenia tree for three hundred yuan and bought two jin of pork head meat and a bottle of Yanghe Daqu in the evening, and drank them by himself in the main room.
In his memory he should have been full of anger that evening, but in fact he just stood by the pit, silently sad for a while, and then went back into the room.
His parents had been laid off for more than half a year and the family was struggling. Flowers are a luxury for the poor. They are far less realistic than three hundred yuan, or two jin of pork head meat and a bottle of Yanghe wine.
After graduating from high school, he began to wander the streets. At that time, his idol was to become a street hero like Scar. Scar was a big shot in the northwest district, and he spent his days with a group of street boys brandishing guns and sticks to help some business owners solve problems they couldn't. During that time, he followed Scar and began to practice boxing. After two years, although he was not much stronger, he had built up a muscular body and could easily sense the presence of power when he stood anywhere and swung his arms slightly.
Scar was sentenced to death at a public trial on National Day in 1997. As he paraded through the prison van, he lost his former heroic spirit and had to rely on two armed police officers to hold his arms to stand steady.
That time, he learned about the Scarring case.
Scar was a thing of the past, and a new street boy soon took his place.
It was in the year Scar was shot that he realized there were no true heroes in the world, and that the behavior of a hero, under certain conditions, was a deep helplessness. He began to keep a low profile, and before that, his name was enough to inspire awe in many young people who had just entered the industry.
He needed to find a new way of life to fill so many boring days.
He changed jobs a lot, but each time it didn't last long. There were always various reasons for him to leave the place he had just become familiar with. He was delivering gas at the gas station for only two weeks when a client's house lost money and came knocking; He was moving materials at the construction site and on the fourth day he blew a middle-aged man's nose bridge. He worked as a security guard in a community property management, and when everyone worked together to catch two thieves, he privately let them go...
He didn't hide this from Luna after he met her, but Luna didn't care about it. Luna knew that he would never take money from a client's home when delivering gas, and that he had broken the guy's nose at the construction site because the guy saw that he was new and bullied him, and that he had privately let the two thieves go because they were once his buddies.
Outside of the big order of society, almost everyone has their own code of conduct, which sometimes contradicts the two, but you can't simply judge good from evil by that.
Luna is a distinctive girl who can look beyond the surface to the essence, and that's why she fell in love with him without hesitation despite the opposition of her family and friends.
And he had some doubts about Luna falling in love with him. Of course he wasn't skeptical of Luna's feelings, but rather felt how lucky he was to have made all this plot, which was supposed to only happen in a fairy tale, a reality.
But his love with Luna was destined not to be as smooth as that of ordinary people.
Luna's family knew of his existence and strongly opposed Luna's association with him. When Luna refused, her father picked her up at her office every day after work and kept her at home during breaks, not allowing her to leave.
Luna is a smart girl. She often comes up with some quirky ideas to get rid of her father. Luna's relationship with her parents was so strained that she locked herself in her room every day when she got home.
If Luna's parents were the kind of rough and unreasonable man, he might not have cared, but he saw a pair of old men with white hair looking gloomy in front of him, and after a righteous rebuke, the old lady pleaded with him to spare her daughter, while Luna's father kept smoking beside him, and his back seemed to bend down in an instant. At that moment, he was extremely conflicted. He couldn't bear to hurt the hearts of the old couple, and even less would he want to lose Luna.
It was Luna's insistence that made him determined.
As he had expected, Luna's parents seemed even more determined than he was, and they firmly refused to let someone like him become their son-in-law. They were all people of status in the city and they couldn't let him, a man at the bottom of society, ruin the social image they had painstakingly built up.
The story unfolds in line with the imagination we get from the TV series, and one event after another pushes him to the brink of the cliff.
He was living in a rented bungalow at this time, and after knocking on the door in the middle of the night, several dark figures stood outside in the darkness. The days of hanging out on the streets made him not afraid of anyone's malicious provocation, but that night he faced not fists but a stack of banknotes.
The money was his reward for leaving Luna.
It was windy that night, and later the banknotes fluttered in the wind. He stood by the door, his heart brimming with anger. If it were his enemy standing in front of him, he would not hesitate to punch him.
But those dark figures represent Luna's parents, and his anger has nowhere to vent.
Another late night, as he returned home after breaking up with Luna, several uniformed police officers were already waiting for him in the alley. Luna's father had a lot of power in the city, and he could kill him with just a little bit of his power.
That time, a deputy chief of the local police station gave him a stern warning, and some of his misdeeds while wandering the streets were brought up again. "If you keep being obsessed, you have only one place to go," the chief said. He knew where it was and clenched his fists in anger after the man in uniform left him. But he still couldn't find a way to vent his power, and for the first time he felt that the force he was fighting against was too powerful for him to resist at all.
Luna was unaware of all this, and she still called him happily, taking it as a game to escape from her parents. When he was with Luna, he couldn't help but recall what her father had said: "Luna is only twenty-three years old. She is still young. She is used to a life without worries about food and clothing. She doesn't know the hardships that life is full of. Love is so important to her life now, so she chose you, and once one day she truly understands that life is not about romance, she will surely regret her choice today. The old man with a military background had a straight back, his eyes burning as he looked at the young man in front of him: "If you really like Luna, you should wish her happiness, but her happiness is not something you can give." The meaning of happiness was originally very simple in his mind: when two people in love can be together, they can create a sense of happiness. But now he knew that perhaps he was wrong, that happiness was not as simple as he had thought. And one day, when he had packed his simple bags and was about to leave the city, the bitter taste that welled up in his heart left him at a loss again.
-- How could he let go of his longing when he was about to leave his beloved girl for a foreign land?
-- What kind of bewilderment must he have in his heart when he is on the journey and has no idea where it ends?
He was lost in thought on the street, and it was dusk. The blood-like setting sun made the western sky as splendid as brocade, and the sunlight was so soft that it splashed faintly on the city and on the people. The building in front of him was unusually tall, and at this moment, some shadows were slowly approaching him.
He was distracted by his thoughts and suddenly heard a clear voice calling his name - RowanRowan! He looked up and saw a girl speeding towards him in the middle of the road.
The girl was tall and slender, with fair skin like jade. Her long hair naturally hung over her shoulders. She wore a beige professional suit dress, looking refreshing and pleasant. The girl was Luna, of course.
Every time he saw Luna, there was a faint pain in his heart, and even at their happiest moments, he couldn't get rid of the pain that was deeply hidden in his heart. He heard that when you feel heartbroken for someone all the time, then you are definitely in love with her.
Now his pain has arisen again, and this time it's not the same as before. For tomorrow he will be leaving the city, leaving the girl he loves. He became impulsive in an instant, too. He ran towards the girl.
The four-lane road wasn't very wide, but the rush of traffic after work was like a surging river.
He was just a step away from Luna, and he saw that Luna couldn't wait to stretch out her arms to him.
With a shrill brake, a black bullet van came to a sudden stop in front of him, and Luna disappeared from his sight. He felt dizzy all of a sudden, and the terror of the sky came crashing down.
The van devoured Luna.
He thought he couldn't lose his beloved girl before leaving the city.
He let out a low growl and quickly turned in the direction of the car. He saw Luna lying on her side on the ground, her eyes closed and motionless. The driver, with a deathly pale face, trembled as he leaned over, as if he had been so frightened that he didn't even have the courage to approach and look.
Without hesitation, he punched the driver hard on the bridge of his nose and turned to pick Luna up.
-- Luna, Luna, wake up!
-- Luna, Luna You can't die!