Her world is a sleeping abyss. Beneath the night woven by autism, colors and sounds are nothing but illusions. Only when her brush moves can she hear the echo of her heartbeat striking the cliff walls. Faded black-and-white silent films, like the silent outline of the abyss.
Li Longfu was the first beam of light to shine into that abyss.
The first time they met in kindergarten, he wore a bright red coat. He crouched beside her, watching her draw the same straight lines over and over with a pencil, then suddenly pressed his red crayon into her hand. “Look, if you draw it like this, the sun will feel warm.”
That flash of red burst into a faint glow, becoming her only trail of light.
Through all the years they grew up together, he was the only vivid color.
She painted gray rain, and he added a red umbrella. She stared blankly at a fan, and he tossed a red scarf into the air so she could watch its soaring arc.
He understood that she drew fallen leaves again and again to count their veins, and that she threw her art supplies because a billboard was too glaring.
When people mocked her paintings for being nothing but black, white, and gray, he held up her sketchbook and declared, “This is her spellbook.”
When she was fifteen, the light had to leave the abyss for a while.
In the month before he left, her stress showed in her paintings: every red thing was colored black, and the waves grew sharp as knives.
He found her locked in the studio, trembling in front of a blank sheet of paper. He said nothing. He simply spread his red coat at her feet and crouched outside the frame, just as he had when they were children.
She didn't look at him, but on the paper she drew a lonely red coat, with two parallel lines beneath it, like the running track he often drew.
That day, he boarded the plane clutching the red stars she had painted overnight. Beside the stars was a long, thin red line, like a path stretching from Australia to Korea.
As the plane took off, she painted the red dot on the horizon at the airport. Then she suddenly stopped. A drop of red paint fell onto the page and spread into a tiny sun.
