I respected and loved my teacher, but I still could not stop myself from going against him on certain positions, criticizing him, attacking him. So he got angry enough to cut ties with me completely, and I cut ties with him in anger too, leaving no way back.

And yet whenever I run into a new problem, I still instinctively see the scene in my mind where I ask him about it, and then the imagined scene of how he might answer me.

He preached to me. A scientist with strict logic, and a very high academic background, yet he always liked studying things he himself defined as metaphysics. His views were always very precise. He could see through to the essence. He was a real wise person. His ability was strong. I have rarely met anyone with that much wisdom. But he seemed to be only one or two years older than me.

Sometimes I could not even figure out my own thoughts, but he could guess their essence, bringing new shocks to my mind again and again. He liked solving riddles, so I let him solve mine. I felt like he would find my riddles very boring, and that made me very frustrated. Every time I meet someone who resembles my teacher, I cannot help testing them, wondering if maybe their mind is as magical as his. This is a strange cycle of substitutes.

As it turns out, every person I think resembles my teacher really can become my new teacher, but in ability they are still a little behind the teacher I cut ties with completely. Maybe they just do not have enough experience.

I can no longer find him. I hope he can forgive me. It is strange. I feel like he probably already has forgiven me. But we can no longer find each other.

Someone like me was once defined by him as a sociopath, because people like me always look cold on the surface, like we do not value feelings, like we have no empathy. We can always cause him some exaggerated kind of pain in strange places, making him angry and sad. So I was a substitute for someone he used to know. And yet, was he not also a substitute for my previous teacher? He studied me. I studied him. In the end, he took back his prejudice. He forgave the previous person, and admitted that people like me have very strange emotional experiences, that this is both a weakness and an advantage.

The funny thing is, one day my teacher said that he was actually a more closed-off version of people like me. After all, if you do not remove deep emotions, there is no way to reach consistency in thought, right? At the very beginning, to him, people like me were actually crude and not refined in thought. So sometimes I would mock him too, saying he could not receive real love. But I was actually just a petty person who got lucky and liked showing off.

So, without a doubt, once our thoughts went deeper, we were destined to clash. I do not know why, but I feel like our connection has not truly broken. I think the wisdom of people like him is scattered all over the world. Maybe that is why I can still feel a sense of connection.