Chapter 52

When I was younger, I had believed that a mental hospital must be very scary, because all the people inside were people like my mum. But who would have thought; after actually being sent in, I didn’t want to leave anymore.

It wasn’t them who were stopping me from leaving. Rather, it was myself who refused to leave no matter what they said.

Actually, within the first year of being there, I had already become fit for discharge. They asked my ‘family’ to come pick me up, and the person I saw standing there was Yan Yang’s father.

I said I had no family. All of my family members had died.

I continued to hide inside the hospital. No matter what others said, I refused to leave.

This place was actually quite a decent option for escaping reality. Although you would face a lot of things that could not be understood with logic or reason, feel like you were living in a warped space, and often forget what was real and what was imagined by the people around you, you didn’t need to go out and deal with those so-called ‘normal people’. To me, this was basically a gift from God.

Of course, the biggest reason why I was hiding in here was that I didn’t dare to face myself.

There were too many things I wanted to run away from, and at the top of the list was my vileness.

In the first year I was here, over the course of my treatment, I finally acknowledged that there were problems with my psyche. At the start, I had been unwilling to cooperate and even often thought about how I could finish myself off. However, in the middle of the night when I remembered that the person I hoped would die was still alive, I knew I couldn’t die yet for now.

I always hoped that the man responsible for my birth would go and die, just like my mother, and that it would be best if he died by jumping off a building.

As I continued to fixate on that thought, the man standing on the windowsill morphed into myself. The person who had fallen and become a mess of flesh and blood also morphed into myself.

But the treatment did have some use. Although it could not untangle the knot in my heart, some of the issues arising from my illness were gradually resolved.

From the second year onwards, I had basically recovered to a point where I was no different from a regular person. Probably because I had once been a lunatic myself, when I looked at the people around me who kept muttering words to themselves and were in dazed states with unpredictable behaviour, I did not find it to be scary or strange.

We were all the same.

I had even made a new friend here, an old grandpa over the age of seventy. In his world, there were two sons. The elder son was always committing malicious deeds, while the younger son was filial and obedient. The elder son beat him and yelled at him. To protect him, the younger son killed the elder son.

This grandpa would always pull me over to talk to me about his younger son. Sometimes, he would even let me ‘meet’ that son.

I only learnt later on that this grandpa indeed had two such sons. However, during their fight, neither of them had won. Both of them had died.

I didn’t know if every mentally ill person had a tragic past, but it was a fact that fate liked to toy with people.

During these two years, I never found out who was paying for my treatment. Apart from the one time I had seen Yan Yang’s father when the hospital wanted me to be discharged, nobody had come to see me.

I lived freely, not thinking about those things that were, perhaps, actually meaningless. In these two years, I also looked back on and sorted out the life I had been leading so far.

Of this crazy, or some might say deranged, and chaotic life, when I looked back on it, I realised it had all been so laughably trivial. 

If I wasn’t thinking about this, then I was thinking about Yan Yang.

Whenever I thought of him, I would feel guilty. I felt like the mere act of thinking of him was staining him, but I couldn’t stop myself either. I thought of him day and night, as the sun rose and set, in rain and shine. Every moment reminded me of him.

He became the shadow of my life. I couldn’t see it or touch it, yet it was always with me.

Sometimes, I would squat on the lawn and talk to my shadow. I would apologise to him, and tell him I missed him.

I would have desire too, touching myself as I looked at my shadow.

My shadow could make me cry, and my shadow could make me laugh too. At night, I wanted to hug my shadow to sleep, but once the lights went out, it would disappear.

He had disappeared.

At times like these, perhaps I really did seem like a mental patient.

During these two years, I had become a traveller, wandering on a deserted island. With the passage of time, I eventually became a tree on the island.

I didn’t want to leave, and didn’t know how to leave anymore either.

To me, there was no other place in the world where I truly belonged.

I thought I would stay like this forever, until nobody was paying for me anymore and I was swept out of the hospital. However, unexpectedly, there was a turning point.

There was an activity room in the hospital. Non-aggressive patients could go there to enjoy recreational activities.

I rarely went because it was too noisy, but one day I just so happened to walk by, and the television was on.

The sound of a piano drifted out from the room. Somehow, although I couldn’t see the television screen from here, I felt that it was Yan Yang playing the piano.

As if I had been bewitched, I walked in. There were people surrounding me making a fuss, but I didn’t care at all, walking towards the television.

It really was him.

He was wearing a black, formal suit, sitting before a grand piano as he performed with great emotion. There was a close-up shot of his slender and limber fingers. Then, I felt like a bullet had been shot into my soul.

The tattoo on his finger had vanished. The ring that we had agreed to never take off, had been ‘taken off’ by him.

The ring finger of my left hand started to burn. The fire quickly spread throughout my whole body, and within the short span of a piano’s tune, I was burnt up into a pile of fine ash.