This year's Spring Festival is very different from previous years. Many people were forced to isolate last year, but this year, more than 100 million Chinese people took the initiative to celebrate the New Year at home. There is entanglement, reluctance, and even a bit of tragic.

This year's Spring Festival is very different from previous years. Last year, many people were forced to isolate, but this year, more than 100 million Chinese people took the initiative to celebrate the New Year at home.

There is entanglement, reluctance, and even a bit of tragic.

"New Year" is too important to Chinese people.

All the sorrows and longings of parting have reached their peak on this day.

We must have a good New Year. Use all your strength to celebrate the New Year, no matter where you are.

Anchor/Xia Meng, soundtrack/"Stay Gold"

text | Xiaoye

edited | Eden (Eden)

design | Xinaobaohua

01.

soon sent a reply, "I think it's okay, I clean my house, go out to get some New Year's goods, prepare more if I like it!" I looked around the room, and there was no food, drinks, snacks, Spring Festival couplets, and lanterns at home, as calm as before, without the atmosphere of the New Year.

As early as mid-January, I was thinking about going home for the New Year, so I cleaned my house clean, washed what should be washed, and threw it away, which was extremely refreshing.

However, at this moment, I felt a little relieved, and the strings that had been tense in my heart relaxed, and suddenly I felt extremely happy. Who would have thought that what has been making me irritated in the past half month is whether to go home for the New Year.

On the January calendar, the time to go home is expected to be pushed again and again. (Photography/Little Night)

The desk calendar on the table best records my mental changes in this period. The "Predicted Go Home Day" moved from January 21st to January 27th, and then extended to February 1st and February 4th... During this period, my mood was like a roller coaster, until it finally reset and was stable.

As a SOHO youth living alone in the Demon City, my time can be said to be very free and I can go home almost at any time, but this Spring Festival holiday is extremely precious to me - during the epidemic, many aspects of work and life have been affected. I am exhausted, urgently need a long holiday that escapes the metropolis, returns to my hometown and is full of the New Year atmosphere to relax. is happy.

After New Year's Day, I was happily preparing for the New Year. I had already made plans to lie down and relax during the Spring Festival: I read books every morning, watch TV in the afternoon, chat with my parents at night, don’t touch the computer for ten days, and prepare to go back to the devil city to fight again next year.

also has "material preparations". Danner's "Philosophy of Art" and Zhu Guangqian's "History of Western Aesthetics" by , bought it and planned to take advantage of this long holiday to read these theoretical works that are not usually easy to read. New Year’s goods are not missing. My dad and I love to drink, the newly released self-heated hot pot, the coffee that is uncomfortable if I don’t drink it a day, etc., and I placed an order and sent it home. Everything is ready, just waiting to board the plane or high-speed rail home early.

My hometown is Shenyang, a city that has finally stabilized after the epidemic situation after tenacious struggle in early January. By the 18th, there had been no new additions for a week. I also began to happily check the air tickets for those two days.

However, the reality is that you will be caught off guard at any time. On January 20, before I bought a ticket, confirmed cases began to appear in Shanghai, which increased to more than a dozen in just a few days. Although the place where I occurred is far away from the community where I live, my mother and I agreed that it would be better for people to remain in place at this juncture.

Even so, I still maintain my expectations. There are still more than 20 days before the New Year. What if I get controlled soon? Maybe I can still get home before New Year's Eve. Although starting those days, friends in the circle of friends have successively posted updates saying that I won’t go home this year’s Spring Festival, I still think that I will never give up until the last moment.

and my mother also went back and forth, repeatedly demonstrating the safety of returning home for several rounds. From home in Shanghai to airport, to home in the north, it took six or seven hours. I was afraid of risks on the road, and my mother was also afraid that I would bring back risks. My hometown is not in Shenyang city, and the control is strict. After returning, I need to self-isolate at home for 14 days and undergo several nucleic acid tests. Every discussion is fruitless and even more upset.

These problems have become one of my sources of anxiety, I never thought that going home for the New Year is so important to me. "Can I go home?" This question lingers in my mind all the time. Sometimes when I wake up at three or four o'clock in the middle of the night, I also have to turn on my phone to see the latest news about the epidemic, and then I have insomnia until dawn.

I seem to suffer from hot search phobia. Every time a certain location in Shanghai is on the hot search, I have to go in and see if there are new cases found. In the end, I was really irritable and just hid my phone to avoid being distracted and affected my work.

My mind was in a mess, and I thought for a while, I should be able to go back. After a while, I wonder what if I meet an asymptomatic carrier along the way, as if two villains were fighting.

If you ask me, is it so anxious for a person who has lived alone for more than ten years? My answer is "of course". Although you can occasionally celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, Valentine's Day, and even birthdays alone, the "New Year" is still different.

On the one hand, as I grow older, I feel that the time I can spend with my parents becomes more and more limited. They look forward to every time I go home from the bottom of their hearts, and are worried that I will ignore my care for them because I am busy with my own affairs. My mother even says to me from time to time, "I want to have a good relationship with you to avoid you being unwilling to come back to see us in the future."

On the other hand, I really don't have such mental preparations. In my life, how can I not go home for the New Year?

However, speaking of this, my parents were very open-minded this time. They were the traditional parents who "goed home to celebrate the New Year no matter what". In the face of the ever-changing situation, they were very "righteous". Maybe it was because my mother had worked in the community and watched the news online every day, and responded to the call for anti-epidemic. She told me, "Don't worry too much about the Spring Festival period. Not going home to celebrate the New Year is not a big deal. As long as you are healthy, you are the greatest happiness, and everything else is not important."

02.

Until the evening of February 5, I was bored for a day and went out for a walk. There were not many vehicles on the road in the magic city in winter, and the cold wind blew me awake. I thought that instead of going home with a nervous heart and causing so many troubles to my family and community epidemic prevention work, it would be better to just celebrate the New Year on the spot.

Really, I never thought of celebrating the New Year alone in Shanghai, never. I have been in Shanghai for nearly 20 years. No matter how expensive the Spring Festival air tickets are or how short the holidays are, I would never be able to rush back to my hometown in Northeast China before New Year's Eve. This is our tradition.

It’s not that I’m not spending the New Year at home. I went abroad to study a few years ago, and only celebrated the New Year but the Spring Festival. There are no holidays. Classes or work fill the seventh day of the New Year after New Year’s Eve. The busy rhythm diluted the depression of homesickness.

So, suddenly facing the situation of celebrating the New Year on the spot, I was actually full of fear in those days. Do I really have to celebrate New Year's Eve alone? Living alone, I have a "home" in physics - my own house, but psychologically, my "home" is just myself.

Other people's family are happy and eating the table full of sumptuous New Year's Eve dinner happily, but I want to hide alone at home. I am not good at cooking, and I don't even have a TV that can create a little joyful atmosphere. Moreover, the next seven days of holidays will almost repeat the scenes of New Year's Eve day after day.

I couldn't help but remember the news about the "isolated island" film festival I saw a few days ago. At the Gothenburg Film Festival, a movie fan will watch movies alone for a week on the island of "the most remote island edge that the wind can blow" in Sweden, , Sweden, on the edge of the archipelago that is farthest, and cannot communicate with the outside world.

I can empathize with that movie fan very much. During this seven-day Spring Festival holiday, my 35-square-meter home is about to become my "isolated island". I watch the morning glow and sunset alone every day. As long as I want, I can watch movies for seven days without even leaving the door, and I feel like "hidden in the city".

says that the highest level of loneliness is "to do surgery alone". As a senior living alone, I have practiced this one, and that's it. But for me, "Celebrating the New Year alone" is the highest level of loneliness.

A good friend asked me to go to her house for New Year’s Eve dinner together. I was old and could go to my fellow villagers’ house for free. But thinking that there were old people above and young people below would probably bring a lot of inconvenience. I am a person who doesn’t like to cause trouble to others and would rather digest this emotion by myself.

I also deeply realized that no one is not afraid of loneliness. Just as we all want to go home for the New Year, in essence, it may not be that the "New Year" is so important, but that at such a festive and joyful moment, people hope that they will be accompanied by their closest relatives. wants to go home for the New Year, but it is actually because I want to reunite with my parents, which is better than their need for my company.

Are those with families or partners not afraid of loneliness? not necessarily. More than once I heard from friends from a family say that they were afraid that their homes would be deserted during holidays, so they would invite people to party, the more lively the better. My parents in my hometown went back to my uncle's house in the countryside for the Spring Festival during the Spring Festival when I was abroad, just to celebrate the New Year.

When they changed houses a few years ago, they specially changed to the busiest street. Every time I went back and felt noisy, they said, "You actually don't understand. When you are old, you like to be lively and crowded." I couldn't feel this feeling at that time, but now I can understand it.

In the past year, due to the repeated outbreak of the epidemic, everyone has been at home for the longest time in history. Regardless of whether they live alone or have a family, they may have doubled their sense of alienation or loneliness. Just as before I knew it, I found that many friends had raised pets, cats, dogs, or others after the outbreak of the epidemic.

At a certain moment, I also moved my heart to keep a pet. It might be a rabbit - the cat is too clingy and the dog needs to walk, and maybe a relatively independent little animal is more suitable for me.

Before this was just an idea, I found a good alternative - buying flowers. I buy a bouquet of fresh flowers every week. I recently found that flowers were sold in the convenience store at my doorstep, a small, exquisite bunch of flowers, 19.9, and fresh preservatives are also included.

I have to say that having flowers or green plants in the room can really greatly reduce the sense of loneliness. Whenever I feel bored or lonely, I go and see them, and I feel less lonely.

After drinking your favorite beer and inserting another flower, the house became vivid. (Photography/Little Night)

03.

When I accepted the reality of "If I don't go home this year, just spend it where I want to", I began to think about what I should be able to do to fill every day of this festival.

First I opened Taobao, chocolate, potato chips, coffee, melon seeds, dried beans, beer... A festival is bound to be free of high-calorie and high-sugar snacks. If you are also a person celebrating the New Year alone, believe me, they are effective means to quickly change your mood. When your stomach is healed, your mood will not be too bad.

"Spring Festival Self-Rescue Plan" second step is to add many dramas and movies to the "want to watch" list on Douban. In addition, I bought a new version of "The Smiling, Proud Wanderer" not long ago, thinking that I could finish reading at least one of the four volumes. I am reading a book about Japanese design. I have not finished reading it since the second half of last year. Thank you for the long Spring Festival holiday, which gave me time to finish it.

The book that has not been finished. (Photography/Xiaoye)

From the morning when you wake up, you will turn on the warm air and eat snacks lazily until the evening, watching TV shows and reading books all day long. Think about it, this kind of opportunity is actually rare in the year.

Also, chasing stars, the private hobby that I was embarrassed to be known to others has become an important sustenance for me during the Spring Festival. The one I like, who has survived the ups and downs of a year, has recently been released with a long-awaited new drama and stage performances. Ah, the feeling of chasing stars during the holiday is really so happy.

Fortunately, even during the Spring Festival holiday, there are still some movie theaters, exhibition halls or live houses open, giving me the opportunity to make an appointment with my friends to have fun.

I am very grateful to myself. I have always had various hobbies and like to pursue fresh and fun things. Even if I am alone for a long time, I will try my best not to be overwhelmed by emptiness or loneliness.

As for New Year’s Eve, one person’s New Year’s Eve must be finished alone. In addition to chatting with family and friends for New Year's greetings and chatting with my family and friends, I plan to watch a day's movies, New Year's Eve dinner, buy the best steak and salmon, pair it with high-end beer, eat and have fun and drink it happily.

But, am I really that lonely? Not necessarily. The fresh food supermarkets, convenience stores, and express delivery stations at your doorstep will not be closed even on New Year’s Eve. Do the people there want to go to work? They want to go home, too, but for various reasons, they choose to stay and continue working.

In this Spring Festival, where more than 100 million Chinese people are said to have "spend the New Year in place", I can feel a sense of love and concern, because so do I.

has another small thing. On the last day of 2020, I went to watch " Mind Travel ". This movie gave me a lot of inspiration, and I also set a small goal for myself: do something meaningful every day and gain a little happiness. is like reading a few pages of books, mastering a new knowledge, or having a few greetings with friends who have not been chatting for a long time to contact your relationship.

But because I was struggling to go home, I forgot this New Year's plan, and I have been silent in my anxiety, ignoring what is the most important thing - that is, no matter where is, I must live the current life.

is not just New Year's Eve, but every day.

Author of this article: Xiaoye, write whatever comes to mind.

The picture signed in this article is provided by the author, and the remaining pictures are CCTV's 2017 Spring Festival Gala public service advertisement "Wait · Arrive", and the copyright belongs to the original author.

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