When I first read Shi Tiesheng, I couldn't understand the line in his text: "We two, mother and son, are together; live well, live well..." At that time, I was too young, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old child who didn't yet know that the bitterness of life could sink into one's bones. I only thought it was a mother's words of comfort to her son. When I read it again, the years had already left some dark marks on me. More than a decade of sorrow and pain seeped out slowly from between the lines, like the silence before an eruption.       Later I understood that those words were not spoken to the child. It was a mother kneeling on the cold stone of fate, using her last breath to plead with the world on behalf of her son.       I often wonder, how can people live such a miserable and desolate life?       At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng's legs suddenly became immobile. He woke up one morning to find the world transformed, and he was left alone where he was. He sat in a wheelchair, watching others walk, watching the autumn wind blow fallen leaves into whirlpools, watching the old walls of Ditan Park gradually decay in the dusk. At the brightest age of life, he had to say goodbye to his own body.       Yet he was still alive, still writing, still thinking, still loving, still groping in the depths of pain for something almost faint but hard. That thing is called "the reason to live." This puzzled me for a long time: such a life, a life that had been wrung hard by fate, what did it rely on to get through those long, silent, neglected nights? Later I thought, perhaps what sustained him was precisely the pain itself.       Pain and regret have weight.       They don't come and go lightly like happiness does. They take root, they dig holes in your heart, and if they dig deep enough, they become the foundation. When I was young, I didn't understand this. I only thought that suffering was a negligence of fate, a mistake of heaven, something that should not have fallen on me. So whenever I was hurt, I felt wronged, felt injustice, felt that the heavens owed me an explanation.       Slowly I came to understand that life is not responsible for explanations, and suffering is inevitable. Everyone comes into the world with their own joys and sorrows already pressed deep into their luggage. Some encounter the abyss in their youth, while others, not until middle age or even when their hair turns white, are struck by a trivial matter on an ordinary afternoon and suddenly fall apart. Early or late, there is no distinction; when the knife falls, it is all the same pain that cuts to the bone.       And regret? Regret is even harder to digest than pain. Pain often comes from the outside, but regret is wine you brew yourself; once it enters your mouth, it burns your internal organs. People always have such nights: replaying a wrong word, a wrong path, a person not held onto, knowing that regret is useless, yet still unable to stop looking back, like touching a rotten tooth with the tip of your tongue—the more it hurts, the more you can't stop.       Regret makes people feel like sinners. Shi Tiesheng sat in Ditan Park for ten years, and he also regretted—regretted the cold words he had said to his mother, regretted not having looked at her properly while she was alive. That regret, he did not hide it; he wrote it out, so finely, so deeply, so painfully, as if to repay an eternal debt on behalf of all who are still alive to all who have already left.       Thus regret became words. After becoming words, it was no longer just one person's wound; it became something shared, a secret signal by which humans recognize each other.       You read that line, and you cry. You cry for yourself, for those days and nights of your own regret.       So I gradually understood that pain and regret are like the inevitable path of life, not because they are noble, nor because they are worthwhile. But because if a person has never truly suffered, they are always light. Light people don't understand the weight of a single tear, don't understand the taste of silence while staring at the wall in the dead of night, and don't understand that the word "hold on" sometimes requires all of a person's strength.       Pain compacts a person, and regret smooths away their edges. What they wear away is not just sharpness, but also the shallow arrogance of inexperience. Only after experiencing true loss do you know to speak softly when you have something, and only then do you know that before saying "I understand you," you should first shut up and listen carefully. No one wants to exchange precious things for these understandings, but since loss has already happened, you must let loss leave something behind.       Shi Tiesheng later wrote that death is a thing not to be rushed, that death is a festival that will surely come. When I read this line, I suddenly laughed and suddenly wanted to cry. A man sitting in a wheelchair, relying on dialysis to stay alive, could actually write about death like a festival—had he seen through it? I dare not say for sure. But what is certain is that he had lived pain through and through. After living it through, a person gains a strange calmness, a real, warm, quiet calm. I think that is what lies deepest in suffering. What lies there are not answers or meaning; perhaps there is nothing else, only a quiet fact: you are still here. You have been drenched by those storms, you have fallen into the mud, you have cried, regretted, thought you couldn't hold on, but you are still here.       Being still here is already an answer.       At some point, the wind started outside the window.       I remembered the line "We two, mother and son, are together, live well." This time, there was no confusion. I just quietly held those words in my mouth, like a piece of candy that wouldn't melt—sweet, and bitter, and unwilling to swallow.       The human world is full of wind and snow, and everyone is a passerby. But there is always someone who, on the coldest night, kept a lamp for you and whispered: Go on, let's live well.