Hard to Escape/In Love with a Counterfeit Tall Rich Handsome - Chapter 4.2

Chapter 4.2

To be honest, every time I entered the rehabilitation room, I felt depressed and gloomy .

I was convinced that I had never been as helpless as when my two legs no longer felt like my own . It was that panicky fear of losing control of the path one stood on .

After the car crash, I had persistently hobbled around with the help of the rehabilitation devices, I stretched my muscles, and I ate lots of protein according to the doctor’s advice . Yet, despite my body appearing recovered and healthy, my leg muscles had atrophied into soft, useless tissue that could no longer support me, no longer push me forward .

The doctor had prescribed me twenty minutes of physical therapy each day, so every morning an assistant helped me complete the simple exercises . But I wasn’t satisfied . These basic, gradual movements led to few results . Everyone thought it was already a miracle that I had survived, so no one had any expectation or optimism that I’d one day stand and walk again . Therefore, their heart wasn’t in it .

Since last week, I had taken advantage of Yin Li’s absence from the house and secretly began to increase my rehabilitation load . It reached the point where I was adding an extra twenty minutes of rehab in the afternoon . However, that was my limit . I still needed to support myself with equipment to stand up .

But today that would change . I would end my dependence on the equipment . I wanted to walk unaided, even if all I could manage was a single tiny step . I knew in my heart that I had no one to rely on but myself so I had to be able to freely walk forward on my own strength .

When I first relaxed my hold on the handrails, my body wildly wobbled back and forth before I found my center of gravity . Then finally, I could take both hands off the bar and remain standing . It felt exhilarating . With a sudden courageous impulse, or you could say, hubris, I then attempted to take a step forwards .

An excruciating pain tore through my body .

My mind was ready to walk but my body wasn’t . As if moving forwards on a knife’s edge, I sweated profusely with each little motion . In the mirror, my pained face warped into that of a ferocious, crazed demon . I glared at my reflection, in which I was gasping for breath like a burdened old cow . I clenched my teeth, put my right foot forwards, and felt pain flare up in my knee and ligaments . My legs were like the broken-down gears of a machine and any minuscule motion created friction between the cogs . It was so painful that I could faint . The five-meter distance between myself and the support felt immeasurably vast .

Sucking in a breath of air, I proceeded to inch my left foot forwards . In my mouth, I could taste the faintly metallic tinge of blood from where I had already bitten through my lip .

As I put my left foot down, I already felt a sense of foreboding . When my heel touched the ground, my leg felt limp and painful, a sensation which was immediately followed by a heart-rending and lung-splitting1 agony . Drowning in the pain, I fought to keep hold of my center of gravity, but I was defeated .

My ears registered the sound of my body crashing heavily to the ground . Really very painful .

Despite being exceedingly careful, I still managed to slip and fall .

In this deserted rehabilitation room, I was actually quite frightened, or you could say uneasy . Every step was so unpredictable, and in any moment I could tumble to the ground again . I was someone who was scared, really scared of pain . And furthermore, all of my fear and suffering was for the sake of this frustratingly slow, extremely difficult progress, was for such an unseemly and inelegant struggle to take just a single, petty, little step .

Only when I fell did the tears brimming in my eyes flow down my face . Lying on my back, eyes raised to the ceiling, I cried silently .

Struggling back up was more even more painful than falling down . The fall and the subsequent pain are instantaneous, but getting up was an endless torment, a bitter misery . By the time I finally managed it I was drenched in sweat, the saltiness of my perspiration flowing from eyebrows to eyelashes . From time to time droplets of sweat landed in my eyes, burning stronger than my own tears .

I messily wiped my face, thinking that just one battle to stand seemed to already exhaust my vitality . But at this moment I was gambling with rest of my life . Each fall only increased my fear of the next, because truthfully in my heart I was a cowardly weakling . If I ever retreated, I knew with certainty that I would never regain the courage to stand back up again .

I inched my left foot forwards again, making an infinitesimally small step, all the while feeling the tremors running through my leg .

When my left foot finally stabilized on the ground, I remembered how to breathe and my heart trembled with emotion . I needed to keep going like this, walking forwards one step at a time, until the day I rediscovered what it was like to to run .

In those five meters, I fell eight times . In that quiet room, one figure tumbled to the ground again and again, and another figure silently crawled back up amidst sweat and tears . There was no audience to applaud at my perseverance, no bouquets of flowers, no spotlight—there was only my loneliness .

When I fell for the last time at the end of those five meters I felt liberated . Even my nerves seemed dulled to the pain . I knew I might have reopened the wound on my lower leg from the way I could feel a warm wetness there and from the faint taste of iron in the air when I inhaled, but I didn’t care at all because I felt like I had finally regained control of my life .

I huddled on the floorboards, curled my arms around my head and silently began to cry . The emotions I had been holding in broke free in that moment and gushed out—the desperation and helplessness I’d felt previously when I worried that I’d never walk again, the fear and dread of facing an unfamiliar world after losing my memories, the disappointment and bitterness when I discovered that no one in the world needed my presence, the false bravado and carefree attitude I masked my panic and weakness in, the discomfort of not knowing how to approach my present and future—all of these feelings poured out of me along with my tears .

I lay on the ground like that, simply crying with whatever strength I had left in me, loudly wailing at the top of my voice . Like I was fighting a battle with myself, I wrestled with all the grievances and fears I had no one to share with and finally defeated the coward in me .

1 In Chinese the phrase “撕心裂肺” translates literally to “heart-tearing, lung-splitting” and is used to indicate extreme pain; grief; etc . I guess an English equivalent might be something like “heart-breaking” or “heart-wrenching” but those are usually more commonly associated with emotional pain, imo .

TL: ALSO we have a bit of a dilemma . I personally enjoy learning Chinese idioms which is why I leave them in somewhat of a literal translation . Niang Niang disagrees with me though and thinks literal translations ruin the flow…what do you guys think??

Niang Niang: Also what do you guys think of having the translation note at the end of the paragraph instead of at the very bottom of the chapter? I imagine the back-and-forth scrolling can get pretty cumbersome .