Drafts That Die Like Sperm

They had potential, But they landed wrong

On my way to class, a certain song hits me — a sudden, dull ache.

A strange, tangled feeling, like a raspy suffocation that I can’t quite name.

My brain starts scrambling for the right metaphors, trying to stack words into a shape that resembles emotion.

The perk of being an animation student is that imagination runs wild.

But what comes out reads like painful, pseudo-poetic nonsense, desperate to sound melancholic.

Well, if words won’t come out — we artists can always draw it, right?

Except the IPad’s dead, and my hand can’t catch up with the mess spinning in my mind.

I even find myself double-tapping the paper with two fingers, delusional, thinking I can "undo."

See? Technology’s evolution has turned me into a useless mess.

And by the time I’m writing all this down, the feeling has already self-digested.

Fine. If I can’t write, then I just won’t.

Even after charging, I won’t have the time to draw it anyway.

My notes app is stuffed with lines of leftover thoughts —

spur-of-the-moment outbursts, written down like some compulsive release,

then forgotten. Again and again.

It’s like a pile of tissues, damp with things that will never become anything.

They came out fast, heated, and full of potential —

but now they just sit there, drying up, meaningless.

That’s what my mind feels like.

My nerves, my thoughts —

once vivid, now slowly crusting over, dying off like something spilled and left to dry.

Can they be recovered? I ask myself.

Probably not.

The dead don’t come back.

This piece was translated from one of my personal Chinese journal entries.

I’m not sure if the translation fully captures the soul of the original —

But I still want to leave the Chinese version below,

Just in case someone can feel it the way I did when I wrote it.

上学途中听到某首歌突然钝痛

很奇妙且复杂的沙哑窒息感

脑子里不断地在寻找合适的修辞去堆砌出感受

作为动画生的好处是想象力拉满

写出的文字却像是不明所以强说愁的疼痛文学

搞艺术的嘛写不出来就画出来吧

平板没电 手也跟不上脑子的构想速度

还时不时地在纸上双指双击妄想撤回

你看 科技进步把我变成了个废物

而我在写下这段文字时自我消化完了

写不出就写不出吧

充完电也没空画了

备忘录里塞满了一堆灵感文字垃圾

就像今天这样一次又一次的发泄再丢弃

而备忘录里沾满粘稠液体的卫生纸

我活跃的神经和思想在逐渐地干涸死去

会被回收吗？我问我自己

大概率不会吧？

人死不能复生。