Sweet Spiral： When Wisdom Dances with Absurdity

My name is Wang Er, but I don't acknowledge that I am Wang Er, even though my household registration booklet, ID card, graduation certificate, and various documents issued by my workplace all clearly state these two characters. I believe I'm someone, someone with wisdom, with thoughts, someone waiting to be swept up by the torrent of history to the pinnacle of life. Of course, this peak is not Mount Everest, but something more metaphysical, such as the peak of wisdom.

These days, people seem to be infected with a virus called "sweetness." They line up, waiting like they're waiting for Godot, for a cup of liquid filled with saccharin, creamer, and some unknown "essence." They call it "Mixue Bingcheng." I once tried to use my wisdom to understand this phenomenon, but in the end, I could only come to one conclusion: this is a fucking absurd world.

My girlfriend, Chen Qingyang, was once a member of this sweet army. She liked that cheap sweetness, that "sense of security" of being swept along in the crowd. I tried to "save" her with my logic and reason, telling her that the stuff in that cup was nothing more than capitalism's sugar-coated bullets, a trap of consumerism. But she just blinked her eyes, magnified by cheap colored contacts, and asked me, "Wang Er, don't you think this is 'sweet'?"

I was speechless. It's like trying to use calculus to explain the formation process of a pile of shit, and in the end, you just get a more complicated pile of shit.

Later, Mixue Bingcheng "collapsed." The word is used so fucking well, like a castle in the air built with inferior cement and expired steel bars, finally collapsing on a sunny afternoon. The reason was that they used expired ingredients and were also found to have hygiene problems. Chen Qingyang looked at the news on her phone, her face pale, as if she had swallowed a dead fly.

"Wang Er..." she murmured, "I... I think I drank a lot of expired..."

I looked at her, and there wasn't a trace of schadenfreude in my heart, but rather a surge of indescribable sadness. This sadness wasn't for her, but for our era. We are swept up in a huge absurdity, like a group of headless flies, chasing false sweetness, but forgetting the real taste.

Chen Qingyang started to go to the toilet frequently, and her complexion became worse and worse. She no longer mentioned the word "sweet," but instead began to study philosophy and existentialism. I don't know if this is a good thing, but at least she started to think.

One day, she suddenly asked me, "Wang Er, what do you think people live for?"

I was stunned. This question, I had asked myself on countless sleepless nights, but I had never found an answer. I looked at her, and suddenly remembered Mr. Lu Xun's words in "A Madman's Diary": "Has it always been like this? Is it right?"

I said to Chen Qingyang, "To not be eaten, to not be devoured by this absurd world, to find our own... um... 'unsweetness'."

Chen Qingyang smiled, a bitter smile, but her eyes sparkled with a light I had never seen before. She hugged me tightly and said, "Wang Er, let's be together, in this absurd world, and find our 'unsweetness'."

At that moment, I suddenly felt that this fucking absurd world wasn't so bad. At least, Chen Qingyang and I still had each other, and we still had that persistent pursuit of "unsweetness."

We held hands and walked in the sunset, behind us was the collapsed "sweet" castle, and in front of us was the unknown, the absurdity, and also hope. Like a constantly rotating spiral, sweetness and bitterness intertwine, wisdom and absurdity dance together, and we are in the center of this spiral, looking for our own exit. This exit may never be found, but the search itself is enough.