One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventeen Days

Illusion

At the front of the classroom, the teacher erased the board in a cloud of chalk dust and casually called her name.

She sat in the second row to my left, across the aisle. As she stood, I instinctively looked up, as though speaking her name quietly pulled a thread. She looked confident, her profile glowing white in the three-o’clock sunlight. Only when everyone else looked at her did I dare keep looking openly.

She was always an untiring little sun: joking loudly with boys in corridors, shouting herself hoarse for our class at sports day. Everyone thought her carefree and indestructible.

But I knew her secret.

Before an entirely ordinary evening study session, I found her at the corner by the stairwell telephone booth. She was calling her mother, voice low but unable to suppress tears: “Mom, I did badly on this exam… I feel so stupid…”

The fierce daytime girl had folded into a little bundle, shoulders trembling. I froze, unsure whether to advance or retreat. Finally I stood silently at the corridor entrance, a clumsy guard keeping passing classmates away.

When she hung up, I offered tissues. With red eyes and none of her usual bravado, she said very, very softly, “Don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

Closer, I noticed her wet lashes, beautiful as grass carrying dew.

That was our first shared secret. Afterward, the narrow aisle between desks could no longer contain certain wildly growing undercurrents.

We worked on the final difficult math problem in moonlight by the corridor window. As she bent over calculations, her pen rustled across the paper and she unconsciously leaned slightly toward me. A lovely scent drifted through the air—not expensive perfume or the clichéd “sunshine smell” of youth novels, but her own faint sweet milk scent, carrying a little body warmth. Specific and vivid, it met every breath beside her.

When I grabbed my hair in frustration over a problem, she looked at me with bright eyes: “Take it slowly. We’ll find a way.” I never believed in luck, but her words were my talisman. Whenever she spoke, dead ends seemed to become safe passages.

Her handwriting was graceful and upright. Once, with new books distributed, I asked her to write my name. My handwriting was poor, but she did not mind and insisted I reciprocate on her title page. Holding the pen and my breath, I wrote her name solemnly, stroke by stroke, quietly engraving it in my heart too.

At midnight she might message, “Can’t sleep.” When I asked why, she instantly replied, “Nothing, just wanted to say goodnight.”

The sunshine then was so good I thought that, if we kept sitting side by side, we could walk together to time’s end.

Light, happiness, warmth. So captivating.

Drowning

I opened my eyes dimly; heavy rain striking glass rushed into my ears.

Darkness pressed tightly over my face like a heavy, water-soaked quilt. I gasped, my chest apparently filled with broken glass, each breath bringing a dull, metallic-sweet pain.

No sunshine, no chalk dust, no eleventh-grade classroom.

Only a messy room and silence too thick to dissolve.

It had been one thousand nine hundred and seventeen days since she left.

I tried to push upright, but my body was heavy and weak. Time seemed meaningless here, fixed in viscous glue. On the bedside table stood the hideous ceramic cup she had insisted on buying; the wardrobe still faintly held that lingering sweet milk scent.

Losing her was not spectacular, heart-rending violence, but endless drizzle seeping into bone. At utterly ordinary moments—seeing her favorite yogurt on a supermarket shelf; automatically ordering “the other cup with no ice and thirty-percent sugar”; walking alone in rain while habitually tilting the umbrella to the right—my heart would suddenly miss a beat, and suffocation would engulf me like a tide.

The more real those bright memories, the more irretrievable this loss. Like someone in a swamp, struggling only sank me deeper. I dared not close my eyes: her every kindness returned immediately, and the brightness I once cherished became heavy chains dragging me into a dark abyss.

I had been trapped in this hopeless reality too long. I thought it was the tone of all remaining life: pain was reality, and reality the whole world.

I could not breathe. I was letting myself die little by little.

Fear stripped away every disguise and left a coward wanting only to flee. I hated this limitless darkness and the light I had once craved. I thought losing light made the world dark; yet darkness was this cruel reality’s underlying color. She had truly given me strength, courage to face the abyss, and questioning that refused surrender, becoming my only meaning while struggling in this barren universe.

Let it be. I accept it gladly. I would be torn repeatedly in this abyss rather than release even the smallest trace of pain.

Darkness, pain, vividness. So captivating.

Emptiness

My shoulder struck the cold wall heavily.

The piercing chill spread through my skin. No storm, no suffocation in the room. Outside, the first bleak morning light slipped through the blinds and projected coldly onto the floor.

In that second, at contact with the wall, all the pain, longing, and tearing sense of loss were drawn away by an invisible force.

Everything was gone.

Mechanically I reached for the phone by my pillow. The screen lit, slightly dazzling.

I stopped at her avatar. The final message was from a late night half a year ago.

[Do you have our teacher’s contact? I want to ask him something.]

My reply: [Yes, I sent it to you.]

[Thanks! I’ll buy you dinner sometime!]

[You’re welcome.]

Earlier were mass-sent New Year wishes, occasional social-media likes, and the sparse, polite, distant exchanges after graduation.

No sweet milk scent, no stairwell tears, no private secrets, no hideous ceramic cup.

My heart still beat violently, carrying the dream’s residual warmth.

But a bewilderment colder than loss slowly climbed my spine.

A vast white land, utterly clean.

No romance. No separation.

To protect the pitiful, humble longing inside me, my brain had woven a lifetime so long and seamless from flawless details and extreme pain.

The deepest sorrow, it turned out, was not gaining and losing, but never truly having.

Not violent tearing, but the extinction of flowers in a mirror and a moon on water.

We were only classmates.

We always had been.