This is a story about waiting.
The day he entered the palace, the chains around his ankles had rubbed his flesh raw.
The emperor ordered someone to unlock them.
The guard who crouched down smiled and gently blew on his wounds.
At that moment, he thought he heard a long-forgotten tune from the southern borderlands. In this man-eating palace, he had found someone from home.
The guard would sneak into the cold palace at midnight to bring him medicine, listen to him play the qin beneath the moon, and, on the winter solstice, bring him a bowl of hot congee and feed it to him one spoonful at a time.
“From now on, I’ll make it for you every winter solstice.”
He believed him.
Until the guard returned gravely wounded from the northern frontier.
He knelt before His Majesty and begged him to save the guard’s life.
Until the guard’s poison took hold, leaving him in unbearable pain.
He knelt again, but this time he begged His Majesty to grant the guard a merciful death.
On the day of the winter solstice amnesty, he was like a fish released back into its pond.
Carrying his qin, he kept looking back as he walked away from the palace, but that person had already transformed into a butterfly and fluttered away.
For the next forty years, he continued to play the qin.
He remembered the words spoken that year: “From now on, I’ll make you congee every winter solstice.”
But he had forgotten to say: When the one who makes the congee is gone, the congee grows cold.
The strings have snapped. Does the longing woven into them remain?
