When I first read Shi Tiesheng, I couldn't understand the line in his essay: "We mother and son, together, will live well, live well..." I was too young then, a child of thirteen or fourteen, unaware that the bitterness of life could sink into the bones. I thought it was merely a mother's comfort to her son. When I read it again, time had left its dark marks on me; the sorrow and pain accumulated over more than a decade began to seep through the lines, in the silence before an eruption.

      Only later did I come to understand that those words were not for the child; they were a mother kneeling on the cold stone of fate, using her last breath to plead with the world for her son.

      I often wonder how a person can live so miserably and desolately.

      At twenty-one, Shi Tiesheng's legs suddenly became paralyzed. He woke up one morning to find the world had changed, and he was left behind alone. Sitting in his wheelchair, he watched others walk, watched the autumn wind blow fallen leaves into whirlpools, watched the old wall of the Temple of Earth slowly decay in the dusk. In the brightest years of life, he first said 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 was called "the reason to live." This puzzled me for a long time: such a life, a life that fate had twisted so tightly, how did it 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 comes and goes lightly, pain takes root, digs a hole in your heart, and the deeper it digs, the more it becomes a foundation. When I was young, I didn't understand this. I thought suffering was a negligence of fate, an error of heaven, something that should not have fallen on me. So whenever I was hurt, I felt wronged, unfair, as if God 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 in their luggage. Some encounter the abyss in youth, while others do not realize until middle age, or even when their hair turns white, on an ordinary afternoon, struck by some trifling matter, suddenly collapsing. Early or late, there is no superiority; when the knife falls, the pain 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 swallowed, it burns your internal organs. People always have such nights: replaying a wrong word, a wrong turn, a person not held back, knowing that regret is useless, yet unable to stop looking back, like touching a bad tooth with the tongue—the more it hurts, the more you cannot stop.

      Regret makes one feel like a sinner. Shi Tiesheng sat in the Temple of Earth for ten years. He also regretted—regretting the cold words he had said to his mother, regretting not having taken a good look at her while she was still alive. That kind of regret he did not hide; he wrote it out, so detailed, so deep, so painful, as if to repay, for all the living, to all the departed, a debt that can never be settled.

      Thus regret became words. Once it became words, it was no longer just one person's wound; it became something common, a secret sign by which humans recognize each other.

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

      So I gradually understood that pain and regret are like the inevitable paths of life, not because they are noble, nor because they are deserved, but because if a person has never truly suffered, they are always light. A light person does not understand the weight of a tear, does not know the taste of staring at the wall in the dead of night, nor does they understand the word "hold on" sometimes requires all one's strength.

      Pain presses people down; regret grinds away their edges. What they wear away is not only sharpness but also the shallow arrogance of inexperience. Only after experiencing true loss does one know to speak softly when possessing; only then does one know to shut up and listen carefully before saying "I understand you." No one would willingly exchange precious things for these understandings, but since loss has already occurred, let loss leave something behind.

      Shi Tiesheng later wrote that death is something not to be rushed; death is a festival that will inevitably come. When I read this, I suddenly smiled, and then felt like crying. A man sitting in a wheelchair, relying on dialysis to stay alive, could describe death like a festival—had he truly seen through it? I dare not say for sure. But one thing is certain: he lived pain to the fullest. After living pain to the fullest, a person attains a strange calmness, a real calmness with warmth, quiet. I think that is what lies deepest in suffering. What is hidden there is not answers or meanings; perhaps there is nothing else, only a quiet fact: you are still here. You have been soaked through by all those snowstorms, you have fallen into mud, you have cried, regretted, thought you couldn't go on, but you are still here.

      Being here is already an answer.

      Outside the window, the wind had risen without my noticing.

      I remembered that line, "We mother and son, together, will live well." This time there was no confusion; I just quietly held the sentence in my mouth, like a piece of candy that wouldn't melt, both sweet and astringent, reluctant to swallow.

      Snowbound wanderers in the world, everyone is just a passerby. But there is always someone who, on the coldest night, kept a lamp for you, whispering: Come on, let's live well.