The first time I read Shi Tiesheng, I couldn't understand the line: "Let's stay together, mother and son, and live well, live well..." I was too young then, a kid of thirteen or fourteen who had yet to learn that life's bitterness can sink into your very bones. To me, it was just a mother comforting her son. When I read it again, time had already left its faint marks on me. Over a decade of grief and pain seeped slowly out from between the lines, in the silence that precedes an eruption.

      Only later did I understand: those words weren't meant for the child. They were a mother, kneeling on the cold stone floor of fate, using her last breath to plead with the world on her son's behalf.

      I often wonder how a person can live through such misery and desolation.

      At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng's legs suddenly gave out. He woke up one morning to find the world had changed, and he was left behind, alone. He sat in his wheelchair, watching others walk, watching the autumn wind swirl fallen leaves into eddies, watching the old walls of Ditan Park slowly crumble in the dusk. At the brightest age of his life, he had to say goodbye to his own body.

      And yet he went on living. He wrote, he thought, he loved, and from the depths of his pain, he unearthed something fragile yet unyielding. That thing was called "a reason to live." This puzzled me for a long time: how did such a life, a life wrung out so hard by fate, manage to endure those long, silent, unvisited nights? Later, I thought, perhaps what held him up was precisely the pain itself.

      Pain and regret have weight.

      Unlike happiness, which flits in and out, light as a feather, they take root. They dig a hole in your heart, and the deeper they dig, the more it becomes a foundation. As a child, I didn't understand this. I thought suffering was a lapse of fate, a mistake by heaven, something that should never have fallen on me. So whenever I got hurt, I felt wronged, felt it was unfair, felt the heavens owed me an explanation.

      Slowly, I came to realize that life doesn't owe anyone an explanation, and suffering is inevitable. Everyone who comes into this world carries their own joys and sorrows buried deep in their pack. Some meet the abyss in their youth; others don't get struck until middle age, or even when their hair has turned white, when some trivial thing on an ordinary afternoon suddenly hits them and they fall apart. Early or late makes no difference—when the blade falls, it cuts to the bone.

      And regret? Regret is harder to digest than pain. Pain often comes from the outside, but regret is wine you brewed yourself; once it goes down, it burns your very organs. Everyone has those nights: replaying a wrong word said, a wrong turn taken, a person you failed to hold onto. You know regret is useless, yet you can't stop looking back, like touching a bad tooth with your tongue—the more it hurts, the more you can't stop.

      Regret makes you feel like a sinner. Shi Tiesheng sat in Ditan Park for ten years, and he, too, felt regret—regret for the cold words he'd said to his mother, regret for not looking at her properly while she was still alive. He didn't hide that regret; he wrote it out, so finely, so deeply, so painfully, as if paying an unpayable debt on behalf of all the living to all the departed.

      And so regret became words. Once it became words, it was no longer just one person's wound; it became something shared, a secret code by which humans recognize one another.

      You read that line, and you cry—for yourself, for your own nights of regret.

      So I've gradually come to understand that pain and regret are a necessary path in life, not because they are noble, not because they are deserved. But because a person who has never truly suffered is always light. A light person doesn't understand the weight of a single tear, doesn't understand the taste of sitting in the dark staring at a wall in silence, doesn't understand that the words "hang in there" can sometimes require every ounce of strength a person has.

      Pain compresses a person; regret grinds down their edges. What they wear away isn't just sharpness, but also the shallow arrogance of inexperience. Only after truly losing something do you learn to speak softly when you have something, and to shut up and listen carefully before saying "I understand you." No one would willingly trade precious things for these lessons, but since the loss has already happened, you have to let it leave something behind.

      Shi Tiesheng later wrote that death is a thing not to be rushed, a festival that will surely come. When I read that line, I suddenly smiled, and then suddenly wanted to cry. A man in a wheelchair, kept alive by dialysis, could write about death like a festival—had he truly let go? I wouldn't dare say so. But what's certain is that he had lived through pain completely. Once you've lived through it completely, you gain a strange calm, a real, warm, quiet calm. I think that's what lies at the very heart of suffering. Not answers, not meaning—perhaps nothing else at all, just one quiet fact: you are still here. You've been soaked through by the storms, you've fallen into the mud, you've cried, you've regretted, you thought you couldn't go on—but you're still here.

      Being here is already an answer.

      Outside the window, the wind has picked up without my noticing.

      I think of that line, "Let's stay together, mother and son, and live well." This time, there's no confusion. I just quietly hold the words in my mouth, like a piece of candy that won't melt—sweet, and bitter, and I can't bear to swallow it.

      The world is full of wind and snow, and everyone is a wayfarer. But there is always someone who, on the coldest night, kept a lamp lit for you and whispered: Come on, let's live well.