Chapter 72 The Sound of Pomegranate Blossoms and Rain (Part 3) Adolescence.
When Ye Li was five years old, she received a music box.
This is not an ordinary plastic toy, but a genuine antique with a gold-rimmed enamel lid. Inside the music box stands a delicately beautiful ballerina, who twirls to the tune of "The Nutcracker," her bud-like dress scattering rings of diamond-like sparkle with each graceful movement.
It was a gift from her mother, one of the birthday presents of the year.
When Ye Li first received it, she liked it very much, after all, no child doesn't love shiny toys.
She took it back to her room and wound it up under the crystal chandelier, carefully admiring every detail of the music box. Under the light, a ballerina wore a lace headdress, her round, lovely face adorned with equally beautiful and delicate makeup. Her cherry-red lips were full and glossy, and her grape-purple pupils contained intricate mechanisms that would slowly blink as she danced.
Ye Li tirelessly wound the spring again and again. Each time, the elegant woman would stop moving as the tone gradually subsided, but her expression remained forever the same. Perfect, precise, repetitive—she gradually began to find it boring.
A child's innocent heart is easily swayed between naivety and malice. Little Ye Li suddenly couldn't stand the ballerina's perpetually pristine and exquisite appearance, and contemplated to do something harmless to her perfect and elegant body.
With an innocent smile, she reached out to the music box, forcefully pried the dancing girl off the base, grabbed her hand, and ran across the corridor, through the neatly trimmed rose bushes under the eaves, until she arrived at the greenhouse.
The gardener had just watered the soil, and beneath the flowerbeds, still glistening with water droplets, lay damp, earthy mud. Without hesitation, Ye Li grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it on the young woman's face. The brownish mud stained the hem of her delicate dress, obscuring its diamond-like brilliance, and the mud, studded with pebbles, jammed her eyelids, which normally moved freely.
Ye Li couldn't help but chuckle. After he had his fill, he stuck the girl into the mud and left without looking back.
That night, the moon seemed very close, a silver disc hanging by the window. She suddenly woke up from her sleep and vaguely heard the girl's cries for help. She hurriedly put on her shoes and ran to the greenhouse, where she pulled the doll out of the soil.
She used the hem of her nightgown to wipe the stains off the ballerina's face. As her face gradually returned to normal, Ye Li suddenly realized that this beautiful face looked so much like her mother's.
Equally exquisite, perfect, and repetitive mother.
Before she was eight years old, her family was a model for everyone. Her parents treated each other with respect, and her father never showed her any fierce expression. On the contrary, he was even quite polite.
Everything was kept within perfect limits, at least on the surface.
It wasn't until much later that Ye Li understood why they had raised her from a young age to be a well-educated and refined young lady, teaching her ballet, violin, horseback riding, and several foreign languages. They were happy to see Ye Li grow up according to their ideal image because they were afraid that any mistake would expose the already crumbling family to the world, tearing away the perfect facade to reveal the unbearable reality beneath.
Her father was a well-known real estate tycoon in the city, and his family had been in business for generations, so they were quite wealthy. At his position, he had countless social engagements and banquets, but no matter how late it was, he would always go home.
He handed his wife a gift and then inquired about his daughter's homework. However, Ye Li was clever and quick-witted from a young age. She keenly noticed that while she was enthusiastically recounting a nursery rhyme she had learned at school that day, although her father's lips maintained the same curve, his eyes had already drifted elsewhere. He was pretending to listen but was not actually listening at all.
The mother's elegant and beautiful face always appeared as a backdrop behind the father's shoulder, fully appreciating the scene of fatherly love and filial piety before her, as if she could draw life energy from this dramatic picture.
Ye Li suddenly felt a chill run down her spine; she felt as if there were two mannequins in her house, like ballerinas.
When it comes to making mannequins, if my mother is number one, there is no one else in the world who can compare to her.
As the perfect wife and mother, she was once a perfect daughter. The traditional virtues of obedience to her husband and mother, being a good wife and mother—these were nothing special to her.
She never argued with her husband, never questioned why he came home late, and despite being a wealthy wife, she was an excellent cook, equally adept in the living room and the kitchen, yet she had no hobbies of her own. She neatly displayed the designer bags and jewelry her husband had given her in a wardrobe larger than an average person's living room, but never used them, because she had no social life and no friends to flaunt. Of course, flaunting is not a virtue, while thrift and domesticity are often admired. Those gifts were like exhibits in a shop window, displaying a husband's boundless love for his wife.
She will always revolve around her husband and daughter, and thus raise a daughter who resembles herself—a perfect daughter. And she sincerely and wholeheartedly prays for her, hoping that in the near future, because of her "perfection," she will also receive a man's long-lasting and stable love.
When Ye Li didn't want to continue her ballet class, her mother would gently squat down, wipe away the tears that streamed down her face from the pain, and tell her, "After you finish learning this piece, Dad will love you even more."
like?
When Ye Li first heard this word, he tried his best to stand on tiptoe, his knuckles cracking, and he gritted his teeth to make a perfect interlacing jump. He jumped and jumped, and the sound of his feet hitting each other echoed in the empty dance studio until the setting sun covered the floor and his sweat and blood turned into badges of excellence.
But she gradually realized that the glorious medals and excellent grades still couldn't attract her father's fleeting gaze, so she stopped pursuing the "love" her mother talked about, and even scoffed at it.
She began to rebel, torturing herself as if she were digging a doll from a music box deep into the mud. Although her mother saw it as a cruel act of abuse, she would still gently reassure others at family gatherings that her daughter was simply going through puberty, which was perfectly normal.
Ye Li looked at that all-too-familiar face, hid behind the curtains and sneered coldly, but couldn't help but imagine whether her perfect mother had also experienced a normal adolescence when she was young.
Until, at the wrong time, she accidentally opened Pandora's box, peeking through the crack in the old, dilapidated door at her father, who seemed alive. What was that? That run-down house, which even her own housekeeper would have considered a mess, yet the overlapping figures of the three people deeply pierced Ye Li's eyes.
She didn't understand what that small room really meant, but the word "home" just naturally came to mind.
For a long time afterward, the scorching sun of that afternoon lingered overhead, and the bitter, strong scent of mugwort haunted her like a persistent ghost, clinging to her day and night.
At another table where only the mother and daughter were seated, a ceramic spoon slipped from her hand and fell onto the carpet. She crawled under the table to retrieve it, but from this unusual angle, she made a startling discovery: a barely perceptible crack had appeared in the mask her mother had worn since birth.
She hid under the cramped, stuffy dining table, her heart feeling as if it were being pulled by an invisible thread.
Well, she thought, it doesn't matter, at least she can get her mother's "love". If she wants to see a perfect Ye Li, if doing so will make her happier, then so be it.
From that day on, she seemed to have suddenly bid farewell to her painful and turbulent adolescence, and a perfectly obedient Ye Li grew up, much like a ballerina standing on a golden pedestal, slowly dancing to a waltz with no end in sight. What drives her to spin is no longer a spring, but a transparent guiding thread that grows from her heart, the other end of which will forever be firmly held in her mother's hand.
A single, transparent thread brought an unprecedented sense of peace to two perfect people.
When Ye Li was in sixth grade, he saw a sentence in his Chinese textbook.
"The widowed, orphaned, lonely, and disabled are all cared for." That was the first time she encountered the word "loneliness." The textbook explained loneliness as having no parents in childhood and no one to care for you in old age.
Ye Li tore out the page from her textbook with that line of text, stuffed it into her mouth, chewed it repeatedly, and even tried to swallow it. That feeling of something stuck in her throat was explained one day when she grew up.
During that period, at sixteen or seventeen, one could truly be considered a normal person's adolescence. Ye Li's mother suddenly began to follow the norms of European ladies, forbidding her from wearing short skirts in the summer and prohibiting her from showing her collarbone.
Especially in front of men.
So, in the sweltering summer heat of over 30 degrees Celsius, Ye Li had to wear a thin, high-necked, long-sleeved shirt and trousers in a room with the air conditioning blasting, to learn piano from the renowned male principal.
She couldn't remember whether she played Chopin or Mozart; she only remembered that her fingers were burning hot, her face was pale, and the moisture in her body seemed to be drawn out by the fuzz on her thin shirt, with sweat soaking under her collar where no one could see. But no one noticed anything amiss until she collapsed from heatstroke at home.
The feeling of almost suffocating made Ye Li suddenly understand the meaning of the word "loneliness." It's not that no one is close to you, but that everyone is walking around you, yet they can't even see that you're about to suffocate from your own sweat.
From then on, she learned to establish a kind of territory within a radius around herself, using disdainful glances and harsh words to keep anyone away. This approach was quite successful, although occasionally, when sitting in a corner, her eyes couldn't help but linger on the warmth emanating from other groups.
But that was only occasionally. She thought that being alone was better than being surrounded by insincere people.
Of course, there had been times when people had brazenly trespassed into her territory, abrupt and awkward, though not exactly rude. But no matter how much time had passed, Ye Li couldn't help but sneer when she recalled that day's events.
That dull-witted person named Xia Zhu, while everyone was happily performing on stage at the class's New Year's Eve party, suddenly appeared, looking dusty and hunched over, weaving through the boisterous crowd from one corner to another, and handed her a similarly dusty sachet that smelled strange.
He stammered and asked her, somewhat foolishly, if she wanted to have dinner with him.
Ye Li stared at the mugwort sachet that seemed to carry a nightmare. Her heart, which should have been filled with disgust and fear, was suddenly filled with a strange feeling. This force came surging but also came suddenly, so much so that she didn't have time to learn new language and expressions to convey her feelings.
He just subconsciously frowned, covered his nose with his fingers, and said in a disdainful tone, "It stinks. What kind of poor bastard smells like this?"
Watching Xia Zhu's clumsy and sluggish departure, Ye Li felt for a moment as if she had done something wrong; the numbness in her fingertips was perhaps called regret.
But intimate relationships were too far removed from her and from Xia Zhu; two poor, clueless teenagers could never manage to handle such a situation.
As they drift alone in the sea of life for some time, they will eventually understand the truths about themselves and others, and then leave them lightly in their memories.
That was the impulsive, passionate, arrogant, and clumsy youth.
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