I gradually regained consciousness from the pitch-black darkness, and my mind was at a loss. I seem to have slept all night, but I don't remember anything from last night, even the room in front of me is very strange to me. There was an unpleasant smell of disinfectant in his nose, and the beeping sound of some kind of machine appeared near his body.
Immediately afterwards, various noisy sounds came from my ears, including chaotic footsteps, noisy voices, and the impact of bottles and cans. These sounds mixed together and entered my eardrum, making it difficult for me to distinguish Who is talking or what is being said, and finally summed up in one sentence: "She is awake!"
A forty-seven or eighteen-year-old man appeared in front of my eyes. He wept with joy and held me in his arms, ignoring my panic. He said he was my father, but it took me a full ten minutes to vaguely see from his face the vicissitudes of life. The appearance of my father in my memory.
My father is clearly in his prime, how could he be an old man in his fifties?
My father was talking nonsense, and with the nurse's explanation, I finally understood my current situation.
Ten years ago I fell down the stairs in an accident and ended up breaking my head, lying in a vegetative state for so long. Doctors suggested whether to declare brain death several times. Fortunately, my father is a professional with a high salary and can afford expensive medical expenses.
Who would have expected that ten years later, I would wake up.
I looked at the girl's face in the mirror, as if I had met a stranger. According to them, I was about eight years old when I fell, and I am eighteen years old this year.
Everything around me felt different, my face, my body, my father, and the world that had changed in the past ten years. Ten years ago, home computers were just popularized, but now everyone has a tablet. What is a tablet and what is a smartphone, I have no idea.
If my father's body can still make me distinguish the shadow of ten years ago, then my mother has almost no impression on me. Although I can't recall my mother's appearance, I always feel that it is completely different from the one in front of me. She hugged me and cried loudly, but I was analyzing how much of it was dry crying. I said she wasn't my mother, but everyone said I was talking nonsense because I broke my head.
This woman has been visiting you day and night since the beginning of your fall, always sitting on your bed and weeping, who else could it be if it wasn't your mother? Who else has such deep affection for you?
Nurse Liu, who took care of me, said that she is an old girl in her early forties, but she does not have the weird temper that the outside world thinks. On the contrary, she is very gentle. Early young woman. She is a good nurse who is serious and responsible, and because of this, she wasted years and wasted years when she was looking for the other half.
Perhaps that is why, after all, I have been asleep for ten years, and both the past and the present are so vague to me. Although my memory stays at the age of eight, if you want me to talk about the situation at that time in detail, I am still vague.
I heard from Nurse Liu that don't read ghost stories before going to bed . It is already a miracle that I can wake up. It is indeed not that easy for my brain cells that have been stagnant for ten years to start speeding up again.
One day, Nurse Liu accompanied me to the garden. I am still not able to walk for the time being, and it will take some time for my lower limbs to recover before I can walk freely. The garden is sunny and fragrant with flowers, probably because the lawn has just been tidied up, and the surrounding area is filled with the smell of green grass.
I take a deep breath and a ball rolls to my feet.
A little girl about seven or eight years old in a hospital gown jumped up to me and said with a smile, "Sleeping Beauty, did the prince wake you up with a kiss?"
I froze for a moment, wondering if this girl regarded her father as a prince? Is there such an old prince?
The little girl held the ball in her hands and continued to say with a smile: "Every day, a prince comes to see you and helps you comb your long hair and trim your nails. Mom said you are Sleeping Beauty. You have been sleeping for a long, long time, until someone The prince will kiss you awake."
"Prince? Who is the prince?"
The little girl pointed behind me, "Here! The prince is coming!" After she finished speaking, she blinked and fled away.
As soon as I turned around, I saw a boy about my age standing there with flowers in his hands, showing a slightly embarrassed smile.
This person asked me to call him "brother" in my father's mouth. It is always difficult for me to say it, because in my chaotic memory, I can't remember that there was such a number one person.
With an eight-year-old mind and an eighteen-year-old body, I am both naive and mature, so maybe my whole body exudes a strange attraction. Relatives, neighbors, and even friends of my parents have come to visit me one after another. They are keen to play a game called "Do you still know me?" Even though I have become a habit of shaking my head, I still don't want to let me go, asking questions one after another, and then showing a smile that I can't tell whether it is disappointment or fun.
After sleeping for ten years, I was not only unfamiliar with this world but also very confused. It took me more than a month to use computers and various intelligent machines freely. Only then did I realize that my literacy was limited and my understanding of various things was very naive. Even if you have learned to surf the Internet, you can't understand most of the web pages, and you just click around foolishly to pass the time.
The so-called elder brother should already be a college student, and he taught me to read and write at a fixed time every day. At the beginning, the progress was very slow. I should have just entered the third grade of elementary school. I had a rough command of writing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I only knew some simple words and sentence patterns in English. After ten years of long sleep, my memory and judgment have been affected to varying degrees, and my reaction is relatively slow. Especially the four mixed operations, I always have to think for a long time.
My brother is very patient. Even if I was biting the tip of my pen and thinking hard about how to write a certain word, he never urged me, but just looked at me with an encouraging smile.
"Come on, Saori. I'll be with you, you won't be alone anymore. I think we'll be studying together soon."
I always feel headaches, and even forget my own name, often have to hesitate a little before remembering that people are talking to me.
At these times, my mother would show her doting, she would let me rest, serving a fluffy Baumkuchen and bergamot-scented Earl Gray tea. She said that it is not a big deal for girls to read less books. I need to rest and recuperate. Anyway, the days ahead will be long, so I can just learn slowly, and there is no need to pursue progress.
I asked my mother to look at the photo album. Those photos from the past should help me retrieve some incomplete memories, so that I don’t have to be rude when facing visiting guests. But my mother was ambiguous, saying that she lent it to a relative and the other party hadn't returned it, and then said that she couldn't find it after a long time, and then she simply pretended that I didn't mention it.
My father is a professional, so he is very busy at work. Since I was discharged from the hospital, I have not seen him go home for dinner for more than 20 days in a month. My mother takes care of the housework alone and takes care of me who is slow and stupid. She not only urges me to take medicine on time but also takes care of my daily diet. She sometimes worries that it will be difficult for me to integrate into society. It's just asking me as a "strange person" and giving up.
In fact, I prefer to stay at home alone. The long-term loneliness has made me lose the desire to communicate with others. In fact, it is also difficult for me to express my true thoughts to others. Words and sentences are very unfamiliar to me.
I was rummaging alone at home that day, and finally I found a few photo albums in a dusty old box in the utility room.
I flipped through old photos under the dim light in the utility room. Some of them should be my father when he was young. He smiled like a spring breeze, and his eyes were narrowed. There are photos of him alone, and photos with a group of people who look like colleagues.
There are also photos of my brother in uniform. From elementary school, junior high school, and high school, it seems like a chronicle about him, watching him grow up bit by bit.
Most of the mother's photos are taken with her elder brother, and of course there are also photos of her father, mother and elder brother. The two of them put their elder brother's shoulders on each other, and the elder brother held a certificate in his hand: the school's three good students in the second semester of the second grade.
As I watched, I noticed a strange thing.
Although of course there are photos of me, but basically they are all photos of me alone, and there is only one photo of my father holding me. At that time, I seemed to be only one year old, with a drop of saliva still dripping from my mouth.
There is no group photo of our family of four. Not even a picture of my parents with me.
Is it because I don't like my parents? Do they only love their brother? Judging from their current reaction, it seems not at all.
My eyes stayed on a photo of me wearing a primary school uniform, and the surrounding environment seemed to be a classroom, decorated with lights and festoons, probably about to carry out some class activities. The photo is very clear, and the school badge on the chest is clearly printed with the words "Yae Elementary School".
Traveling alone is a challenge for me, but my brother taught me how to use the Internet. I carefully planned the map, repeatedly deliberated on the bus route, and secretly figured it out for a long time before I mustered up the courage to go out. Of course, it was unavoidable to stand at the crossroads and look around with a blank face, and finally asked the way to find the subway station.
The area where Yae Elementary School is located is far away from my home. From the map, it can be regarded as a small satellite city surrounded by the city. It should be possible to get there by switching several subway lines and changing to a bus. So, after spending more than two hours, I finally stood in front of the gate of Yae Primary School.
It is already four o'clock in the afternoon, it should be the time for the elementary school to leave school, the parents who came to pick up their children blocked the gate, and fortunately, I was able to sneak in with my head down.
The campus was noisy, and there were students running and playing in the corridor, almost bumping into me several times. I don't know where to go, and I can't remember which floor my original class was on. I guess I found the third grade floor. The school has probably been renovated, and the classroom looks brand new, which is quite different from the background in the photo.
At this time, a middle-aged woman holding a cardboard box walked towards me. She was about fifty years old and suddenly stared at me. … Saori?"
Before I could answer, she smiled self-deprecatingly, "I'm sorry, it shouldn't be, why did Saori come here?"
"I am Saori."
Today is Teacher Lin's last day. At the age of fifty-five, Teacher Lin will officially put down his teaching stick today, leave his teaching position and go home to entertain his grandchildren. And the most coincidental thing is that she was my class teacher when I was studying in Yae Primary School ten years ago.
She put down the cardboard box, and held my hand in the corridor, sighing endlessly. She said she never expected to see me wake up before she retired, let alone see me at school.
I stared at her face, maybe the older I get, the less changes, I can easily find her old appearance on her face, she is still so amiable, her smile is full of healing, and can easily infect the people around her. I remember that my classmates liked Mr. Lin very much at that time. They all said that Mr. Lin was the most reasonable and good teacher in the school. Having Mr. Lin as the tutor in class was like luck to draw a lottery!
Referring to the past, Teacher Lin said that when she heard that I fell down the stairs and became a vegetable, she was extremely sad. She said that I was a good student with good academic performance and everyone in the class liked me. He also asked me if I remember not reading ghost stories before going to bed , I once won the winning prize in the school composition competition on behalf of the class!
I vaguely dealt with a few words, who remembers the past ten years ago so clearly? I took out the photo of the classroom with lights and festoons from my pocket, and asked her if she had any impressions. I judged that my fall should be after this. First, the age in the photo was about eight or nine years old; There are no more pictures of me left after this photo.
Teacher Lin put on reading glasses and looked at it for a few minutes, and said that this should be a photo of the parent visit day in the first semester of the third grade. Although she was a little fuzzy about the details, she vaguely remembered that I performed well on that day and earned a lot for her. face.
As she said that, she suddenly searched through the cardboard box as if remembering something, and finally she found a photo album, and then she took out a photo and handed it to me.
"Your parents came to visit that day, and they took a photo with you later. It's a pity that you had an accident not long after, and you were transferred to a big hospital for treatment. This photo has never been given to you. What a coincidence today. Concern."
In the photo, a man and a woman are both in their thirties, and they can be regarded as talented and well-matched. They put my shoulders on each other, squatted down, and smiled happily at the camera.
"Who is this woman?" I pointed to the woman in her thirties in the photo and asked.
Teacher Lin was stunned, "Her? This is your mother!"
"Mom…Mom?" Although they are all good-looking women, the woman in the photo does not have the slightest similarity with my mother, and they don't look like the same person no matter what.
Teacher Lin sighed and said, "No wonder you don't know. Didn't your father tell you? On the day you were hurt, your mother died unexpectedly. Alas, your father is really miserable."
I gasped. If my mother passed away ten years ago, who was that in the family? I looked at the photo Teacher Lin gave me, and there was an unconcealable sadness under the woman's smile.