In the morning, I watched some English videos for a while and played some games. I steamed and ate the rice cakes I bought yesterday, and then, before I knew it, noon had passed without me realizing what else I had done.

Afternoon

This afternoon, I read Letter from an Unknown Woman. I listened to the audiobook¹ while following along with the English translation I bought on Duozhuayu. The narration of the audiobook was very emotional and captivating, so I finished it quickly. Since I’m not yet very familiar with English, I suspected I might have missed some details. So I searched further, thinking of checking others’ interpretations, and came across this video².

I learned that this novel reflects certain psychological and human nature-related themes. Through AI, I saw keywords like Freud’s “death drive,” which piqued my curiosity. I then delved deeper into the meaning of the death drive and its counterpart, the life drive, which intertwine within human nature, forming intricate psychological and behavioral patterns.

I can’t yet comment on whether the love displayed by the female protagonist in the novel is great, humble, or even real love. I do agree, however, that it is more of a form of self-deception and an escape from both herself and reality.

Evening

Lately, I haven’t had much of an appetite, let alone the motivation to go to the market to buy groceries. For dinner, I casually boiled some noodles and fried two eggs to make do. The eggs ended up burnt and didn’t taste very good.

After finishing the meal and washing the dishes, I thought about going out for a walk. As I approached Zhongshan District No. 2 Primary School, I called my mom to come down and join me. For a while, we couldn’t find each other—the root cause being that I couldn’t understand her directional adverbs like “this side,” “that side,” “up there,” “down there,” “behind,” or “in front.” After finally meeting up, I decided to teach her how to use WeChat’s location-sharing feature. We passed an intersection, and I intentionally walked separately from her, asking her to observe the changes in the avatar’s position on her phone. She seemed to half-understand. At the next intersection, I did the same, telling her to come find me.

After two forks in the road, she still hadn’t found me. I called her to correct her directions, and she finally managed to locate me—though she looked exhausted and impatiently swiped WeChat into the background, returning to her home screen. I then asked her where she wanted to walk, and I followed her lead.

Somewhat expectedly yet unexpectedly, she took a wrong turn and ended up in another residential area, but we corrected it eventually. I think from now on, I’ll just follow her and let her lead the way.