Ye Zixin, a Woman from Fujian

The Ye Zixin Series:

The world is a shattered mirror, and each of us moves forward clutching its sharp fragments.

I counted the bloody marks in my palm lines. They were cold as a block of dry ice that would never melt, its molecular structure perfectly free at eighteen degrees below zero.

Roses always rain from Li Hao’s eyes, their withered petals piling up into the coffin of our seventeenth year.

Duan Lingling’s lipstick marks are phosphorus flames, and every kiss makes the midnight ceiling shed its plaster.

And Ye Zixin always bursts through a revolving door at the deepest point of autumn, the tips of her hair dusted with flecks of gold from the universe.

Heraclitus said no one can step into the same river twice, but five different fish swim in my wounds. They breathe my loneliness through their gills and refract the moonlight outside the window with their scales.

When the seventh rainy season had finally flooded the city up to its waist, I understood at last that love is nothing more than two incomplete bodies reflecting one another, their cracks happening to form the shape of light.