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11memory card
Feeling that Guo Jia loves taking photos, recording videos, and audio, holding up a DV camera and calling out Wenhe Wenhe to look at the camera, Jia Xu helplessly raised a middle finger at the camera, causing Guo Jia to laugh and pounce on him. The two squeezed into a small room of less than 30 square meters, even fighting over brushing their teeth in the morning. The balcony was filled with thriving green plants and a round fish tank with lotus leaf edges. The memory card was filled with one picture after another, labeled and stored in a small box, arranged by year and month. Special events were stored separately on another memory card.
Later, the two earned some money and moved to a bigger house. The new house's balcony didn't have as good lighting, so the plants gradually withered, their heart-shaped leaves curling and drooping over the edge of the pots. Their arguments increased, and then an accident happened on a rainy day when they stormed out of the house. They never returned to that new house for a long time. When they finally opened it, the flowers on the balcony had withered, and the goldfish in the tank were belly-up, their decaying parts melting in the water, emitting a foul smell.
Jia Xu commanded people to clear out his own things, and when he brushed past Guo Jia without looking back, it seemed like they had broken up.
The long-uninhabited house was filled with old dust and a faint musty smell, enveloping the entire heart. Guo Jia lay on the sofa, thick dust sticking to his white shirt, unable to be washed away, only to be discarded. Everything from the past had been sealed away, along with box after box of memory cards, seven years, eighty-four months, ninety-two memory cards.
Later, Jia Xu received those boxes of memory cards, Guo Jia's handwriting had faded with time, leaving only blurry traces. Jia Xu coldly watched the girl shivering in her coat in front of him, showing no intention of inviting her in to sit. The two of them stood at the door in a stalemate for a long time, until Jia Xu took the handbag and closed the door. The girl seemed to breathe a sigh of relief and clattered away in her bright red high heels.
In today's era, there are no longer any machines that can read memory cards, so those cards are placed on the TV cabinet. The iron box covered with cartoon stickers does not match the plain wood-paneled TV cabinet, like a thin thorn, so Jia Xu stuffed it into the drawer. Every day after work, Jia Xu deliberately avoided that drawer until a night of pouring rain when he suddenly felt an urgent need for a card reader.
So he went out by car. Such a downpour reminded him of a night twelve years ago, also a downpour, also a car rushing in the rain, with flashing headlights. Jia Xu went to seven stores and bought a secondhand card reader, still usable, for five hundred yuan.
Back home, he connected it to the TV and inserted a memory card named 42, not sure if it was the 42nd day or the 42nd month. In fact, most of the recorded content was quite boring, mostly Guo Jia talking to himself, holding up a DV camera and making some strange expressions, filming the new green shoots growing on the balcony, filming the earth-shattering genius sentences just written on the draft paper, filming the calligraphy hanging on the wall. Guo Jia always liked to bring the camera very close, so close that even in the distorted picture, you could see the fibers of the grass on the rice paper, and then slowly pull the camera away, facing his own face, saying to the camera, "Wenhe, I know you will see this."
Everyday life in Guo Jia's lens is dull yet vibrant, and at the end of the video, Guo Jia sits on a chair by the balcony, surrounded by plants. He looks at the camera with a smile and asks, "Wenhe, do you know why this memory card is called 42? Because the answer to life, the universe, and everything is just 42 characters in English. So, 42 is the ultimate answer to the world. Congratulations, you've found the answer to the world. I love you." The video ends here, the screen goes black, and then, due to a sudden thunder, it flickers with snowflakes. Jia Xu raises his hand to turn off the TV, leans back on the sofa, and thinks, "Some people are truly a nuisance."
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