The neon lights at twelve o'clock at midnight have just spread over the tops of the plane trees, and Absinthe is wiping a Czech crystal glass behind the bar. The wall of the cup reflects the shadow on his eyelashes, like unmelted winter snow - three years ago he fled from the conference room on Financial Street to this old alley, changed all his suits into indigo work clothes, and used the 30 million he saved to purchase this pub called "Seventh Night".
Shen Bing always said that he spent his days soaking in wine to ferment. When she pushed open the glass door with her red Martin boots, she still had a newly completed architectural sketch in her apron pocket, and the tips of her hair were stained with pencil dust from the design institute. As the only partner of Absinthe, she is responsible for planning the layout of the wine cabinets with drawings accurate to the millimeter, but she always secretly adds soda water to Absinthe's whiskey after closing time.
The regulars at the tavern each have their own stories. The old lady in cheongsam comes here every Wednesday to drink the special sweet-scented osmanthus wine, saying it tastes like the moonlight in Shanghai in 1946; the programmer Xiao Zhang always orders a glass of "Code Crash" at two o'clock in the morning, watching the absinthe layer blue orange liqueur and bitters into the color of the malfunctioning screen; and the man who always wears sunglasses orders pure absinthe every time, but never lets the ice ball touch the wall of the glass, as if guarding some melting secret.
When the fingertips of absinthe passed over the wine label, he would think of what his father said in the wine cellar: "Good wine, like people, must have white space." He watched Shen Bing use a compass to draw the starry sky ceiling of the tavern on the back of the wine list, and suddenly understood that the so-called daily life is just having someone accompany you in the amber wine late at night, slowly seeing each other's edges and corners hidden under the ice ball.
