The first time I heard that song, it was playing on the radio.
It was one of those nights when the breeze was soft and my mood was calm to the point of indifference. But the moment that slightly cynical, carefree melody slipped into my ears, everything inside me seemed to clear. Night turned into daytime, and suddenly I was back in the summer when I was seventeen: alone, carefree, riding a bicycle without any real destination along narrow country roads. Sunlight filtered through the trees and broke into scattered patches on the ground, as if those shifting flecks of light were the finest ornament life could offer.
If I say I have always been on the road, that is the most romantic version of what it means.
But life, like a man, never shows only one face. And for someone actually living through it, the story of being "on the road" has a much more practical meaning—one that has nothing to do with romance.
A new job has kept me running around constantly these past two days. After standing under the full force of the July sun, drenched in sweat, I finally understood that midsummer is not made of lyrical beauty or sweet fruit. For ordinary people, it is more often made of bitterness. In the instant I wiped the sweat from my face, I felt with unusual clarity what it means that even heaven would grow old if it had feelings, while the true condition of the world is hardship and change.
There is no need to mention anything else. The heat alone is enough to make everything feel difficult. I even find myself missing my old job. However unsatisfying it may have been, at least it did not force me to endure this furnace-like season like some test from hell.
Then there is the unfamiliarity of the new work itself, and that is what makes me hesitate the most. I have always been someone who clings to the past. I am not good at changing myself, and I am even worse at dealing with people smoothly. In a new job, those are not small flaws but deep internal wounds. The frustration that has come with this change has left me wavering these two days, hovering again and again between staying and leaving. Compared with physical exhaustion, the greater pain may be the choice taking shape in my own heart.
Tonight, no one seems able to sleep, and once again I have slipped into pessimism. Life feels like a cigarette: from the outside it looks firm, solid, dependable, yet once you light it, all that comes out is a cloud of smoke—weightless, drifting, impossible to hold.
I am still on the road, only there is nothing especially romantic about it. I drag myself through life, and in living I decay a little; in that decay, life still goes on. How many more times I will have to endure this cycle of exhaustion, this dull and sickly repetition, I do not know.
For these past two days, I really have been on the road, just not with the ease and freedom that songs like to promise. What has accompanied me is only scorching heat and a bitterness that rises from somewhere deep inside. When dreams finally run headlong into reality, it becomes obvious that life has always been cruel. Some people live so low to the ground that there is no poetry left in it at all.
Or perhaps there is another way to understand life: maybe its poetry has always been cruel.
