The Mystery of the Teaching Building Wilderness and the Parallel Self
First, I was changing my bottoms in the restroom of the teaching building. I draped the pants I took off over the partition, looked at myself in the mirror above the sink: hair, face, top, bottoms, and then went out. I found the classrooms and corridors completely empty. Startled and bewildered, I walked further. Twos and threes of people appeared in the corridor. I asked them where this was, and they answered me: the wild.\nThe wild, in the wild. Is it the wild of the African savanna, or the wild of the Zhou dynasty's 'wild men'? Is it the wild of 'killing my spring in the wild', or the wild of 'the great hermit hides in the court, the middle hermit in the city, the minor hermit in the wild'? I suddenly looked down in panic and realized I had still worn the wrong bottoms, so I ran back to the restroom with all my might, only to find that the pants resting on the partition had already been swapped for the correct pair.\nAfter changing and going out, everything in the teaching building was back to normal. The bell rang; it was time for class.\n\nThen it was me sitting at my desk in the dorm, watching an instructional video on quantum physics: observation, existence, possibility, parallel universes. I turned my head and found myself in my high school uniform appearing under the opposite bed. My roommate panicked, asking what was wrong. I said it was nothing; I had also seen another me when I listened to my high school homeroom teacher talk about wave-particle duality.\nI asked myself, do you feel anything? I said, I have no memories, and therefore no feelings. I asked, then where do you come from? I answered, from a giant character 'Desolation'.\nThen it dawned on me: so it was a giant desolate wilderness! The origin is such, the destination knows neither rain nor shine, and the world is one. I said, then you should go back. The high school me looked into my eyes and said, why should it be me, why shouldn't you go back?\nSo I stood up and threw her out the window: dodging her pulling, prying apart her struggles, watching her fall. Under the ginkgo tree, she turned into a golden snub-nosed monkey.
