Stepping into Solitude

With his battered spine, he snatches my gaze away from a row of vibrant colors; his worn cover seems to lonely proclaim how long he has accompanied me; he casts a cold eye upon the newly arrived, pristine books around him, before retreating alone into the darkness without a word.
I can no longer remember when he came to my side, yet I have toured this kaleidoscopic world over and over again—the borders of the swamp unseen even by the gypsies, the lock of hair slumbering in a reliquary for a hundred years until now, the frigid skyscrapers made of ice and when they might ever be realized from a dream, the intimacy between brothers that gradually vanishes with age, and how the music spilling from the pianola turns sisters into rivals, only for them to grow weary once the prize is won. I cast down my pen, wishing to melt into these thin pages, to swoop past the noisy gasps beneath the eaves on the flying carpet of the first priest from a century ago; I wish to step before the monstrous, shackled man and touch that giant block of ice that refracts the light; I wish to wait with a trembling heart for him to come before me in a bathroom entirely veiled by yellow butterflies and fallen leaves, crawling with scorpions.
My past rebellion was written into the pages as if the author had been standing beside me, observing and gazing closely, as though the loneliness I had experienced before—the loneliness of growing up—were a performance staged according to his script. Like that girl, I played a piano described only in ideals, displaying my excellence and brilliance before others, yet never for a single second of my life stepping away from the grandmother who represented shelter, who sheltered me. Yet on a night that could not have been more ordinary, destroying all the honors I had gained simply for the sake of destruction, with scorpions and spiders surrounding my unshielded, trembling, naked body, I welcomed a purpose that had already been killed by a shotgun. Although, in the novel, after the only surviving infant was sent away in a bamboo basket upon the water, she was sent off and forced to tragically end her tragic, lonely life alone in a tomb-like convent, I felt awakened by this story, quickly breaking free from my own rebellion and smiling bitterly at my own growth.
My fervor was taught to me by José Arcadio Buendía. To successfully promote his somniloquy-like solar warfare, he was willing to travel thousands of miles to a capital that was impossible to reach at the time! When I sink into the swamp of unsolvable math problems, he guides me forward with an absolutely optimistic spirit that fills heaven and earth. My composure is the gloomy mist of Old Melquíades; with his hat like a black crow, he etched a deep memory into my heart.
With more than ten minutes left before six o’clock in the morning, I used to sit alone in my seat with my beloved book, secretly savoring that deserted, tranquil dawn that seemed to exist outside of time, until the space of the classroom that belonged to me alone was stripped away by the growing clamor of arriving people. Embracing him, I overcame the nervousness in my heart and walked through the bustling crowds, as if sheltered by him and unnoticed by anyone. I have copied down countless excerpts from One Hundred Years of Solitude—those sentences that seemed to strike a profound resonance in the depths of my soul, that lonely wandering of ghosts in the rain, and that swamp stretching to the other side of the world, all made me linger.
Time presses heavily upon me. Stepping into solitude, the end of solitude is naturally growth. Aureliano believed that the function of money was nothing more than a tool to gild keys. He could hardly feel the slightest resonance with any potential use of money, devoting everything instead to the alchemy he so dearly loved, just as I use electronic devices to search for problems to improve myself rather than indulging in meaningless feeds of information or deeply despised games. Or like the fifth-generation Aureliano, locking himself in that ancient room forgotten by people for far, far too long, where only the sunlight through the window lattice remained a constant guest, throwing his energy into studying the parchments to the point of forgetting food and sleep—just like my own uncontrollable passion for immersing myself in problems in the small hours of the night. And Melquíades’s fervent goodwill in repairing the pianola, a goodwill like that of an innocent child disregarding reality and trying with all his might to apply his ancient wisdom, touched me so deeply.
Most famous of all is the Colonel who won renown in the wars, even though most people take greater delight in talking about the countless assassination attempts he survived, or the exquisite, handcrafted little goldfishes sold after the war that people so longed to possess. He represents aloofness and ambition, bearing a dual name, yet his most unforgettable achievement was truly looking at and remembering the appearance of his aging mother for the first time. That mother with a mouthful of rotting teeth, a head of white hair, and frightened eyes—while he searched his deepest, most distant memories for a matching image, only to find he no longer possessed any warm memories. For a long time, I dared not look anyone directly in the eye, letting my evasive gaze rest frantically on the lapels of others, as if I were looking at them. Yet, I am fortunate enough to face a mother who has not yet grown old, to adorn the room with the swooping and melodious cooing of white doves alongside her on some late-rising morning as fresh as those in the book. Many years later, I will surely remember that beautiful morning, when youth like the rising sun sparkled in my mother’s eyes.
Even though the family condemned to one hundred years of solitude will not have a second opportunity on earth, is everything in life already predestined? Even though death had already struck as a shadow in the Colonel’s childhood, were not the victories he won time and again spoken of time and again a hundred years later? When I close the pages, countless yellow butterflies once again flutter in my mind; when the Colonel turns his past experiences into verses and rhymes, when in the corridor of begonias he once again sees his family as if resurrected from distant memories, his solitude has quietly shattered into yellow butterflies. When stepping into solitude, we will encounter tens of thousands of different sorrows, yet in the end, we shall not be trapped in the mist.

Written for a certain essay contest