A raggedly dressed man held a torch high above his head, walking along a road swallowed by endless fog.
The gale howled, yet the fog remained boundless and unbroken. It had never dispersed, only hung heavily in the air, shrouding both the road ahead and the road behind in darkness. All around him was silence. Only the flame he held aloft faintly lit a little of the mist, flickering weakly across the vast wasteland.
He could only use it to illuminate the ground beneath his feet, but he could not see the road before him. Hesitant and uncertain, he moved forward by feeling his way through the dark. Even so, he still feared that the wind stirred by each of his steps might join the great wind that never ceased blowing here and extinguish the torch.
The flame was like a fragile spirit that might vanish at any moment, trying to light up the world around it; yet merely protecting itself had already exhausted almost all its strength.
The wind was like a blade, sweeping up gravel and striking his face. He held the torch high, his arm aching until it went numb. Yet he paid no attention to any of this. He only kept looking around, as if searching for something. The fog spread endlessly. All he could see around him was emptiness and darkness, and yet he seemed unaware of this, still trying to see something through all the barriers before him.
He was a seeker.
On this road, the wind had been blowing for decades, and he had been carrying the flame for decades. The flame had never gone out, and the road seemed to have no end. Over all those years, he had searched constantly, watching the road before him while looking around, avoiding whatever obstacles he might encounter and trying not to fall.
He once had an umbrella, which he could use to shield himself from the wind rushing toward him and move forward more quickly. But gradually, the wind tore the umbrella to pieces, and he had no choice but to throw it away and walk against the gale.
Several times, he passed by a few weather-dried skeletons. Without exception, the two hollow eye sockets in their skulls stared fixedly toward the road ahead. The first time he saw them, he was surprised that there had been others on this road. But after seeing such remains several more times, he became only curious about what they had been looking at — what, exactly, lay ahead on this road.
And yet what he was searching for was an oasis without raging winds and without dense fog. He also knew that he was not the only one searching for it, because once, the wind carried the words of other seekers to him:
“Tell me, do you think there really is an oasis?”
“I have never found one.”
“Then do you know what lies at the end of the road?”
“…”
He tried to catch more fragments of their conversation, but the words scattered into the wind. He had never met another person before, and now that he had heard human voices, he anxiously took a few steps forward. But he only crashed into more fog, and this effort had already made his torch flicker violently, nearly going out.
He stopped at once. Yet a vast, world-ending loneliness surged up from the bottom of his heart, almost darkening his vision. Suddenly, he felt an irresistible urge to shout. And so, for the first time in decades, he opened his mouth and cried out, hearing a hoarse voice emerge from his own throat:
“Is anyone there—”
His voice echoed through the fog and the gale, carried farther and farther away, but no one answered. So he shouted again, and then again, shouting without stopping. Until at last he realized that no matter how he called out, there would never be a response.
He gave up trying. For the first time, he lowered the hand that had been holding the torch high and sat down in the middle of the road, utterly dejected.
The gale still wrapped itself around the fog and continued to blow, showing no sign of weakening.
Once he stopped walking, he suddenly felt so light. He sat there alone in silence, no longer having the energy to care about the flickering torch. His mind gradually drifted into a haze. He forgot what he had been searching for, and he forgot why he was walking on this road at all.
Then, all of a sudden, he heard another voice beside his ear. It was so close that he was certain the person speaking was right next to him.
“If you keep this up, you’ll die, you know.”
He abruptly raised his head and saw a faint light moving slowly forward, growing farther and farther away from him. He realized that it was a torch just like his own, and he knew that someone like him had just passed by and said those brief words to him.
He could not see that person’s figure clearly. He wanted to call out and ask them to wait, but the firelight had already vanished into the fog ahead. Suddenly, he remembered the skeletons he had seen before, and a chill ran through his heart. A firm light burst into his eyes once more.
He raised the torch high again and took another step forward.
He knew full well that all things in the world sought to extinguish the flame. That was precisely why he had to hold the torch high, so that he might cross the vast dark night of his life.
He no longer thought about what lay ahead.
But he was still searching.
He was a seeker.
Afterword:
This piece was written during a timed essay competition in my third year of high school. It is admittedly rather rough, but considering that it was written under time pressure and almost entirely improvised, it still won first prize in the High School Student Magazine Cup.
My state of mind at the time was quite complicated. I had been feeling depressed for a long while and could not find a stable environment where I felt any real sense of belonging. Around the same time, I had just finished reading The Legend of Wukong by Jin Hezai, where I came across a line quoted in the book — and yes, I also quoted it in this piece, making it a quote within a quote:
“All things seek to extinguish the flame, and so I must hold this flame high, that I may cross the vast dark night of my life.”
Cool as hell, right? That was exactly what I thought back then. So I extended the image behind that sentence into this story.
The metaphors in the piece are quite clear, so I will not spell them out. The title, “The Seeker,” was actually my grandmother’s WeChat name. I thought it fit the story perfectly, so I used it.
My favorite part is this passage:
This passage combines two things.
During that period, I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez three times, so the first paragraph is partly a tribute to the scene where Úrsula curses. That passage is insanely good. It shocked me the first time I read it. I also deliberately tried to imitate García Márquez’s style, though I probably overreached a little. Heh.
The second paragraph pays tribute to Natsume’s Book of Friends, probably Season 4 or Season 5. There are two episodes about going home. After losing his parents as a child, Natsume stayed at a neighbor’s house and suffered quietly for a long time. One night, he ran out the door and kept running alone in the direction of home, crying as he called out loudly for his father and mother. In the end, he collapsed in the middle of the road, exhausted, and realized that no matter how he called out, there would never be a response. All he could do was look ahead.
That scene nearly made me cry when I watched it, so it left a very deep impression on me.