TSIBAMS Chapter 113
by VolareYe Xing took the film roll out of the film camera and handed it to the film developing technician.
This was a film developing shop he had been watching for a long time, one that seemed like it was about to close down at any moment but always stubbornly stayed alive. However, while he had been keeping an eye on it, this was the first time he finally had a reason to enter.
“I’ll call you in a couple of days, come pick up the photos.”
After the technician spoke, he turned and went into the darkroom.
People who still developed film in a darkroom in this day and age had a bit of an artisan spirit, so Ye Xing held a sense of respect for this shop that, though it had few customers, had stood for over a decade without being defeated by digital photos.
This feeling sustained him as he watched the technician’s back disappear into the darkroom for tens of seconds before he realized he should leave.
Ye Xing glanced at the time, calculated something in his head, and then flipped open his call history. Almost a whole page was filled with the same phone number. He randomly pressed it, effortlessly dialing the number.
The other party picked up quickly: “Hello?”
“Hello doctor, this is Ye Xing,” Ye Xing said, putting his hands into his pockets. While walking in the direction of his home, he asked, “Is my mother…Ms. Fang Rong, any better today?”
“She just left,” the doctor said, “She’s much better than the first time she came. I think we can reduce the frequency of psychological counseling starting next month.”
“Really?” Ye Xing was somewhat excited. After all, 500 yuan per hour for consultation was not an easy number for his family’s current financial situation, “Thank you doctor, so do we need to reduce her medication?”
“The medication you got at the mental health center before?” the doctor said, “Keep taking it. Only through combining medication to regulate physiological issues and communication to regulate psychological issues can we achieve the best results. That oral liquid is for calming nerves and helps with sleep. It doesn’t have many side effects. As for the pill, after this course of treatment, we can probably switch medications.”
“Thank you doctor! Thank you!” Ye Xing was somewhat incoherent.
Although Fang Rong did not allow him to follow her every time she went for psychological counseling, from her condition and the doctor’s attitude, the situation wasn’t too pessimistic.
No bad news was already good news.
At this time, the doctor spoke again: “There is something very important that I need your cooperation with.”
“You can say it.”
“This is a problem she has never mentioned, and you’ve never given me any feedback about, but from my observation during this time, I can sense that her anxiety is not entirely due to the changes of the past year. The seeds might have been planted much earlier—she has always been a little self-conscious.”
“Self-conscious?”
Ye Xing stopped walking. He had never associated these two words with Fang Rong, and he didn’t know why she would be that way.
“It might not have been obvious before, especially during this past year or so…” the doctor paused, “Judging from her tone and how frequently she mentions it, she hates the fact that she is a housewife very much.”
Ye Xing was stunned.
Hates?
Housewife?
What was all this about!
His mind was a mess for a moment, unable to properly digest this information.
“This is not unexpected, this kind of case is actually quite common,” the doctor explained to him patiently, “But because she has been emphasizing, and even you have been saying, that her illness was triggered after learning about your sexual orientation, my direction of guidance for the past period hasn’t been entirely accurate. Of course, through communication and guidance during this period, she doesn’t seem to be so resistant to it anymore, which isn’t a complete waste of effort.”
“But, before discovering my…” Ye Xing suddenly felt that the three words were stuck in his throat, so he could only sigh, “She was always very normal before.”
“Don’t just blame yourself, she herself wasn’t aware of it.” The doctor’s tone was as calm as ever, “But don’t worry, my job is to find the core of the problem and solve it. This matter requires your cooperation. I hope you will help her build up her confidence in your daily life.”
“Okay.” Ye Xing continued to walk forward, feeling that every step was heavier than the last, so heavy that lifting his feet and then putting them down again was already very tiring, and he had no time to think about anything else, “What do I need to do?”
“Let her realize that she plays an indispensable role in the family, to find her own value. Actually, it’s not that difficult. Many people experience the stage of ‘my existence has no value’, like those who grew up in harsh environments, those who just left the ivory tower… especially those who are older but don’t have any skills to survive. Your mother belongs to the latter, so the most direct way is to let her gain a sense of achievement from doing something, so as to realize her own value, for example, work.”
Ye Xing listened carefully to every word the doctor said, trying to stuff them all into his brain, even though it was already a mess.
Luckily, this doctor didn’t waste words and spoke directly to the point. He successfully extracted the key point of “work” from the end of that long speech.
——It didn’t sound too difficult to handle.
Ye Xing breathed a sigh of relief, as if a weight he never should have carried was lifted from his shoulders.
He couldn’t explain his current relaxed yet complex mood. Just thinking that Fang Rong’s problem wasn’t, or at least not entirely, that he liked the same gender, made him wish he could immediately fly to the doctor’s studio and then run eight hundred laps around the office building out of gratitude.
This suddenly gave him some impulse and also gave him a reason to escape, or rather, an answer.
“I have one last question I want to ask you.”
“Go ahead.”
He cleared his throat and asked, “Do you think homosexuality is a disease?”
When he asked this question, he felt like half of his burdens had been relieved.
The answer was no longer important. He had already had his own scale in his heart, and he had already been biased. Whether the doctor affirmed or denied it would only be a matter of adding weight or dropping weight from his own leaning.
“From an objective point of view, there has never been any research showing that homosexuality has any connection with mental pathology. In 2001, the Chinese Medical Association removed homosexuality from the list of psychiatric illnesses, and the American Psychological Association removed homosexual behavior from the disease classification system as early as 1973. So, it no longer belongs to the category of diseases.” The doctor said the above paragraph as fluently and unemotionally as if he were reciting from a book. Then, his tone suddenly became gentle, “Finally, I believe that the forms and objects of expressing and entrusting emotions are not unique. So, who you want to be with is a matter of the heart.”
“Thank you,” Ye Xing said, rubbing his nose, his voice hoarse.
Thank you for adding a considerable amount of weight.
He stepped on the rustling fallen leaves, feeling like he had never been so light these past few days.
After hanging up the phone, Ye Xing looked up and saw the café named “Wutong” across the street, as if it were some kind of guide, it just so happened to appear before his eyes.
The streetlights flickered, red light stop, green light go.
He walked forward with the crowd, and then stopped outside the closed door of the café.
It was probably really fate, just a second ago someone had told him that there was hope for his terrible days, and the next second help arrived, as if afraid that he would exert too much effort.
The words “Shop for Rent” were plastered on the glass window, and below it was a string of phone numbers.
Ye Xing stood in front of the phone number, looking somewhat blankly at his own reflection on the glass. On this bustling street, behind him were the masses of people, moving constantly, seemingly full of vitality.
And the person standing in front of the café was motionless, looking through the glass window at the dim space inside, a kind of expectation growing from the bottom of his heart, gradually becoming somewhat emotional.
Finally, he took out his phone from his pocket.
Ten minutes later, a taxi stopped by the side of the road, and Wu Tong opened the car door, rushing straight towards Ye Xing in a flurry.
“I was wondering where you got my mom’s phone number! It was right here!” Wu Tong laughed, “Add me on WeChat later, next time just contact me directly!”
“I was just taking a chance, I wasn’t sure if you had gone abroad or not,” Ye Xing said.
Wu Tong opened the door and invited him inside, “We’re leaving next Wednesday, if you were any later, you’d really be too late.”
Ye Xing followed her inside.
This was the first time he had been here. Before, he had only taken a quick glance from the outside when he passed by. His impression of it was that it was a café that wasn’t particularly eye-catching but had a good location, so business had always been pretty good.
Today he discovered that it was actually something special.
Unlike most cafés that had high-end, sophisticated, and cold styles, at first glance, it was actually a bit crowded and messy.
Right inside the door was a small, peeling cabinet, on which was piled a bunch of picture frames without photos. In the middle was a golden hanging clock marked with Roman numerals, probably it was placed on the cabinet by the wall because there was nowhere else to hang it.
And on the wall that should have had the clock were various yellowed posters and old newspapers. Where there was nothing posted, there were several long and short shelves, which were filled with discarded wine bottles stuck with all kinds of dried flowers, which even Xu Ge would find amazing.
Further inside, there was actually a pile of old books stacked as high as a person’s waist. On top of it was a white lace tablecloth, which proudly served as a table for sugar packets and creamers…
He continued to search with his eyes.
A discarded dial telephone, a black old-fashioned bicycle, a gramophone with a big horn…
Ye Xing was stunned.
“Is this real?”
“Huh?” Wu Tong followed his gaze, “You mean the gramophone? Of course, it’s real, underneath are records, and the café usually randomly plays these records.”
“Your shop is quite unique,” Ye Xing said with admiration.
“My mother has a sentimental attachment to these old things,” Wu Tong said, “Actually, my mother has been looking for someone to take over this shop for two months now. She contacted several interested parties, and things were going well, but because they all planned to make major renovations to the café after taking over, my mother kept considering it. After all, these were all the things she picked up from the second-hand market, and she couldn’t bear to move them.”
Hearing the words “second-hand market,” he subconsciously touched the film camera hanging on his chest.
This action attracted Wu Tong’s attention. Her expression was somewhat surprised, “You play with film? What a coincidence, there’s a film camera in the cabinet too, but no one in our family knows how to use this thing, it’s been gathering dust for more than ten years!”
As she spoke, she walked inside and stopped in front of a glass cabinet, gesturing for Ye Xing to take a look.
“I didn’t expect your café to have so many ‘treasures’,” Ye Xing said, leaning in front of the glass cabinet, his eyes shining brightly, “This brand is even older than mine!”
“Looks like my mom has finally met someone who truly loves this café! I’ll find the key to this cabinet when I get back and give it to you!”
“I’m also quite surprised,” Ye Xing smiled, his eyes full of undisguised fondness, “I’ll transfer the deposit to you now! If it ends up in someone else’s hands, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
Wu Tong had never seen Ye Xing so flustered, and she laughed for a while while holding her stomach.
She waved her hand, “Don’t worry! My mom will be here soon, you guys can discuss it slowly.”
“Okay,” Ye Xing nodded.
“It’s really too rare!” Wu Tong couldn’t help but sigh, “It’s like ‘searching high and low, only to find what I was looking for with no effort at all.’ For you to take over this café, it can be considered to have found a good match! By the way, where did you buy this camera? It seems like the second-hand market here moved away several years ago.”
“A friend bought it for me,” Ye Xing said, grasping the leather shoulder strap, his thumb gently rubbing back and forth.
Seeing how much he loved it, Wu Tong teased, “What kind of friend, is this…”
“Boyfriend.”
Ye Xing almost blurted it out.
He didn’t know why, maybe it was after talking to the psychologist, but he had been holding onto an unprecedented excitement in his heart, even a certain sense of relief from past humiliations—finally, he had the opportunity to release it at this time.