I always put on that cold helmet late at night, where moonlight hides in the gaps between screws and plastic. When the 380 grams press down on my brow, my cervical spine protests with tiny complaints, like an old house groaning in the rainy season. But when the halo of virtual reality permeates my pupils, those floating particles gently cradle my head, as if all gravity has been released into a black hole of data.
The weight of reality is quantifiable. The density of air that fills my lungs when the subway car is crowded, the KPI numbers dancing on the screensaver at my workstation, the frost flowers condensing on the glass of the convenience store freezer late at night. They stack up into invisible blocks of lead, bending my spine into a question mark and causing my pupils to lose focus. I once tried to dilute them with sweat on the treadmill, to fight them with the tremors of caffeine, until one day I realized that the weight of reality had long seeped into my marrow, becoming some kind of inherent original sin.
The gravity of the virtual world, however, is deceptive. When I stand on the deck of the Titanic dancing with Rose, when I touch the red dunes on the surface of Mars, when I weep for relatives I've never met at a virtual funeral—at those moments, the physical weight of the helmet is replaced by the lightness of meaning. I can revel in eternal nights under the neon of cyberpunk, sleep with glowing jellyfish in an underwater city, and browse long-out-of-print poetry collections in a cloud library. The shackles of reality are pixelated, transformed into illusions that can be removed at any time.
Until one day, when I offered non-existent white chrysanthemums at a virtual funeral for my mother, the weight of reality suddenly returned in the most brutal way. I saw my mother hunched over in the kitchen wiping nonexistent grease stains, saw her repeatedly confirming the video call button on her old phone screen, saw her crushing blood pressure medication and mixing it into the purple rice porridge I sent. The lightness of the virtual world instantly collapsed, transforming into the image of my mother’s unsteady figure in the surveillance camera, into the new white hairs at her temples, into the group photos in her phone album where I am forever absent.
It turns out the weight of reality has never lessened; it has merely been transferred to the cloud. We shielded ourselves from 38 tons of loneliness with a 380-gram helmet, diluted the real absence with virtual embraces. As data streams wash over our numb nerves, are we building a refuge with the lightness of technology for the unbearable weight of life?
Tonight I take off the helmet, letting the soreness in my cervical spine remind me that I am still alive. The weight of reality is roaring in the kitchen’s range hood, growing in my mother’s white hair, stubbornly thriving in every morning and dusk we try to escape. Perhaps we need to learn to dance with this weight, like tree roots penetrating rock layers, like migratory birds carrying storms, like rivers carrying silt toward the sea. After all, the heaviest thing has never been the helmet, but our obsession with lightness.