Chapter 1. -- I Remembered

It is so embarrassed to get lost in the city.


Chapter 1. I Remembered.


In my town, all the houses stood on the two sides of the Main Street. And I was so familiar with the town that when people asked me the location of certain place, I would play the trick like this: "Sir, please walk along until you see the bakery on the left side, you can't miss it for the fragrance of the 2 P.M bread, and the big pink flag of “Flower Flour”, which slightly tilting above the front door and pointing upward to the bronze church bell; Please enter the bakery, find the shelf with a name tag of “Raisin Toast”. Look outside through the shelf and the window pane, you'll see it frames an aged brown wooden door in the ten o'clock direction. That's the place, Sir." I would definitely say so if a stranger had wanted to visit Katerina.

Sure there was an address as " 2^nd Floor, Vizione Valley, Main St., 31". But nobody in the town would use them; I mean, to memorize one's own address for the mail purpose is one thing, but to use it as an index to find a location? Why bother? Only the strangers had troubles to find a place in town, and they could always get the direction from the town people!

Except Mr. Du, the postman; he might be the "only one" who still understood the mysterious syntax in the town. He was required to study it to pass the postal exam. When I was a child I had ever pushed him to teach me the address rule, and felt momentarily funny when seeing him blush.

"It is too complicated for a young kid like you." he said.

"I would teach you, only if you had finished the trigonometry class!"

I must have been too young to emotionally accept a great loss. I remembered that I shouted almost painfully: "Not trigonometry!!"

For a while I had been mad with Mr. Du, and had thought that I myself could be a qualified postman. I knew all the addressees' places in town, and Katerina would help me to read the addressee's name correctly. From the name to the place, who needed trigonometry? Who needed the freaky address!

Nevertheless for the most of the time I respected Mr. Du a lot. After all he was the man in town who could decrypt the address syntax! (Sure after all this time I heard both Dr. Wang and Ms. Alexian, my high school teacher, possessed this knowledge as well, but they had been on my avoiding list for long time, and somehow I never connected them other than disease and math!)

As the time went by I became more and more easily to get confused, while became lazier and lazier to find out the reason behind. It had been so many years, but once in a while, strangely, the scenes would jump up clearly in front of my eyes.

Memory is that odd. Like an unexpected nap on the sweater, once you notice it and try to pull it out, it draws more with a link of thread. A probably smart way might be, chop it out with a pair of scissors before it dissolves the whole sweater.

Or, just ignore it?