This trip was so exhausting... I was crammed into my seat with my legs curled up like a bird, couldn’t sleep well, and the food was disgusting. After going through layovers, changing to a train, then the subway, and lugging my suitcase up the stairs, I finally got home and took a look—

The air was thick with dust, as if I’d stepped right into the Sahara Desert.

I normally use pine cat litter at home; it’s clean and dust-free, but you have to clean it out often. Every time, right before I start writing, I make a point to go and check. ’Have they pooped? Does it need scooping? Yes? Perfect, I can procrastinate for another ten minutes.’

When I left, I hired someone to come over and take care of the cats, so I couldn’t very well ask them to scoop the litter three times a day on schedule, could I? So I had to use regular cat litter. Oh my god, the dust was insane. Every single object, no matter its original color, was now a uniform grayish-white. My apartment looked like it had been hit by a sandstorm; it’s definitely not qualified to host a G7 summit anymore.

Vacuuming, mopping, wiping down furniture... I was already half-dead from exhaustion when I discovered a load of clothes in the washing machine. Clothes I had washed before I left... and I never took them out all this time. Now, spread the wings of your imagination and picture that smell. It was absolutely lethal.

I pretty much just squatted on the floor and dry-heaved half my soul out.

After I finished cleaning everything, the smell still wouldn’t go away. Sitting down in a room permeated with the lingering stench of cat poop, I finally managed to make a cup of coffee (let’s see which one of you motherfuckers can’t resist making a civet coffee joke), opened my laptop and, hey, guess what? The screen wouldn’t turn on.

I kept opening and closing the laptop over and over again. Occasionally, it would deign to light up for a moment. I’d type in my password, and it would go dark again, like a shy maiden.

AAAAAAH

AAAAAAAAAAAH

West Lake’s lovely scenery, in the days of Liuyue...

So if my screen won’t light up, how am I typing this? Because I have an external e-ink monitor... The resolution is extremely low and incredibly blurry. Things like those account logins where you have to pick out all the pictures with traffic lights are completely impossible. All I can really do is type. I can tell which parts are the words and which parts are the background, and that’s about it.

How blurry is it? Blurry enough that if this wasn’t my native language, I’d have a hard time recognizing any of it.

When I was still curled up like a bird on the plane, before I got too tired, I wrote 980 words. I’ve been home for several hours, and now I’m at 1020 words.

Anyway, I’ll post this Chapter whenever I finish writing it. Right now, my legs are trembling just from going up and down the stairs, and my muscles feel like they have wood grain. I don’t even know how I got this tired...