As my fingertips traced the clay, I finally read the meaning of eternal life.
There was once a popular saying on the Internet that the tears shed by the world for “Ghost” flowed and converged into the Pacific Ocean.
The moment I turned off the projector late at night, the moonlight outside the window happened to fall on the traces of undried tears. I unconsciously rubbed my fingertips against the mug on the desk, and suddenly realized that I was imitating the pottery scene in the movie, which had become warmer and warmer with time – Molly and Sam’s overlapping hands danced on the rotating clay, and the wet clay kept reshaping its form in the centrifugal force, just like the love of these two lovers who were crushed and reorganized by fate. As a post-95 generation who grew up in an era of material abundance, I have seen too many romances piled up with diamonds and roses, but in this scene with no kisses and no hugs, I have for the first time touched the primitive texture of the tremor of love. When Sam becomes a ghost, those transparent knuckles suspended in the morning light, those futile embraces through the body of the lover, has become a precise metaphor for the contemporary people who want to touch and stop through the cell phone screen; and Carl’s betrayal in a suit, like a quenched lancet cut through the sugar coating of the fairy tale, he spat out “six million dollars is enough to buy anyone’s soul,” the neighboring couples suddenly loosened their palms by half an inch, which is even more chilling than any thriller shot. It’s more chilling than any thriller. Underneath the absurd purple eye shadow of the psychic Audeme, there is a transparent wisdom that has been sharpened by life – the mercenary way she bargains with the ghosts and the cunning way she steals the chocolates, on the contrary, breaks down the myth of black or white morality, and makes this smoky woman the most reliable ferryman between the worlds of the yin and the yang.
As a Gen Z believer in big data, I should have laughed at the “ghost existence” setting, but in the moment when Sam moves the coin with his obsession, I was reminded of the “law of conservation of energy”. If love is really some kind of quantum of energy, then are the late-night messages sent to a deceased lover, but never answered, piling up in a mountain of mailboxes in some dimension? When Molly finally let go of her lover and let him walk towards the pure white halo, the ancient Eastern saying “if you don’t forget, there will be an echo” resonates wonderfully with the Western doorway to the afterlife – there is no judgment or promise of reincarnation here, but it makes the goodbye kiss closer to eternity than any religious picture. At 3:00 a.m., when my cell phone screen lit up with the message “Are you home yet?”, I suddenly read this parable born before the dawn of the Internet: when information can arrive at the speed of light, we have lost the patience to stare at the starry river under each other’s eyes. Those thoughts that need to cross life and death in order to be transmitted may be curled up in the bubble of messages that have been read but not returned, in the gaze that is averted during a video call, and in every moment of restraint when I want to say “I love you” but replace it with an emoticon.
At this moment, the moonlight is still shining on the empty mug, the ceramic surface is flowing with the shimmering light after the flame quenching. It turns out that the best love is never the sparkle of diamonds, but the texture of clay that has undergone kiln changes – with tiny cracks and air holes, but therefore able to hold the temperature of the precipitation of the years. When Sam’s soul smiled and dissipated in the holy light, what he left behind was not a tragic finale, but an apocalypse for all those who believe in love: as long as the potter’s wheel of memory is still spinning, we will always hold the power to remake eternity.
