That Time and That Place

Peng Wei
 
 
I was like a lot of children; one of my childhood games was to draw a watch on my wrist.
 
On April 03, 2010, I once again started to draw watches on my wrist every day, with the time set to 9:20 a.m.
 
But this time it is not a game. Perhaps I added another game, a game that we could never win, like testing time and power.
 
The things that happened on April 3 upset me and kept me awake at night. From that day, I discovered that, when faced with this kind of event, all we can do is wait and count the time. One, two, three days...
 
Games become sad. Some of the watches were drawn very beautifully, very contentedly. Then slowly, the traces on the skin became blurry and washed away.
 
I don’t really believe in anything, apart from time. Time is fair to everyone, but time is also cruel. Some things become clearer and more eternal with time, but many more things are kindly erased by time. I don’t actually even believe in time.
 
Sometimes, we can’t help but remain silent, waiting for time to pass, but time never waits for us.
 
Time is like a magician’s spell; we can’t escape it, because we are bound to it. When confronting time, I am completely helpless; I can only choose to believe.
 
Escape. But who can escape the pursuit of time? Clocks and time quantify life, killing the eternal.
 
Recording 81 days is not an attempt to hold on to pain, but rather, it is an attempt to use time to understand time and everything else, good and bad, indistinctness and clarity, sweetness and sorrow, impermanence, and eternity.