Xie Yinyin and I are both disabled. To be precise, I can't speak, and she's blind.
She lost her sight in a car accident as an adult. But she's a painter, and losing her eyes was like losing everything, so she tried to kill herself several times.
She rented the apartment below mine. Faced with the cruelty of those around us, we found comfort in each other and fell in love. We were together for four years.
I wrote in her palm: Ye Chen will never let Yinyin down.
She told me in sign language: Yinyin will always stay by Ye Chen's side.
But later, she fell down the stairs. By some miracle, the blood clot in her skull disappeared, and she regained her sight. She also became a sought-after artist in the industry.
At her celebration party, she told her best friend, “Ye Chen saw me at my most miserable and ugly, but I never got to see myself that way. So whenever he brings up the past now, I feel like some creep has been spying on me for four years.”
“The only reason I can stand being with him now is that his face looks a bit like that man's.”
“If he had the sense to disappear on his own, maybe one day I could remember a few good things about him.”
But she didn't know that my speech had returned in our first year together. For her sake, I pretended to be mute for three years.
She also didn't know that the man I supposedly resembled was actually the one who looked like me.
