Why not stay a while?

(Baonghean) -What if, before abandoning something dear, we lingered a little to question and answer the question of our life?

In my alley, a child was given a star lantern by his parents, so at night he invited the surrounding children to go around the neighborhood carrying it. I sat drinking tea with the neighbors and felt so envious. I wished I could be a child again, playing with the lanterns like the children, innocent and extremely happy. While playing happily, the child with the lantern suddenly started crying. It turned out that someone passing by had brushed against his lantern, causing it to fall and break the handle, making it unable to light up and hang up anymore.

Some adults thought something was wrong and ran out to see, making the boy cry even more. He held the lamp tightly with both hands, despite everyone's offers to show them what was wrong, to see if they could fix it, and if they couldn't, to buy him a new one. No matter how they tried to comfort him, the boy wouldn't stop crying, so he sat down on the sidewalk of a house, crying and hugging the lamp like it was a treasure.

The boy only stopped crying when one of the group ran home and brought out a jar of glue, scissors and a roll of wire, and the two of them worked hard to fix the lamp. The adults stood watching the two children cutting and pasting, smiling and shaking their heads: "Children are really like that, they don't want the new but they regret and cling to the old!"

Illustration: Nam Phong

The story of the lamp reminds me of a couple, also from the same neighborhood. They were young, had been married for only two years, and had a little boy about 6 months old. The husband worked all day and came home late at night. The wife stayed home to take care of the children, cook, and clean the house.

It was fine if the couple did not see each other, but whenever the husband came home, they would quarrel loudly. They used harsh words to each other like: “If I had known, I would not have married you!”, “Get out of the house now!”, “I am so tired of your old face!”… Like that, countless times their voices mixed with the crying of children, making the whole neighborhood dizzy.

And then they really went to court, they officially broke up after an argument that started with a very trivial reason. After the divorce, the wife took the children back to the countryside, the husband came home late every night drunk.

That's it, we adults have become impatient, hasty, we quickly make decisions to throw something away easily. If only before abandoning something dear, we would linger a bit to ask ourselves and answer the question of our life, something that even an inanimate computer can do as in a poem by Nguyen The Hoang Linh: "... once I wrote a poem on the computer/ and named the file "tinhyeu"/ when I was not satisfied, I intended to delete it/ the computer, which is considered to be forever indifferent, asked me:/ "are you sure you want to delete "tinhyeu"?/ I shivered/ my friend".

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