With one light press of a button and a 15-second countdown to go back, it felt as if something had truly come to an end. As though I had returned to places where none of it had ever happened, and yet everything had already changed.
I had never wanted to do it, and I could not bear to do it either. In the end, though, leaving it undone was no longer possible. I had thought I would wait for the automatic prompt, but I still could not hold back. Better to do it manually, at least so it would be clear and unmistakable.
Stopping and starting, starting and stopping, I still arrived at the end. Does everything really have a moment when it must stop?
The truth is, I have already learned to take many things more lightly. But they have never truly disappeared. Some traces do not fade. They remain like a plotline that can never be erased.
Lately I have begun to notice how so many things are slowly vanishing. The feeling of them grows more distant all the time. Will they really disappear completely in the end? That thought is frightening.
Scenes I once believed I would never forget, things I once thought would stay carved into me forever—will I still be able to remember them later on?
There was once an If. But somewhere in the middle, an else appeared, something neither of us had expected. And in the end, it led not to the ending we had hoped for, but to an End If we never imagined.
A person is like a complicated program. In Chinese thought, there is yin and yang; in computing, there is 1 and 0. Add all kinds of If and While, and out of that comes endless variation, shaping all kinds of lives.
End If is not the end of the program. It only means this particular If has reached its close. After End If, there will be another If, and then another, until the program has fulfilled what it was meant to do.
So perhaps this is the time for it to end.
And perhaps it is also time to wait for a new If.