When Chen Lexin died, her daughter was just four months old.
At 3:16 in the afternoon, she collapsed at her workstation, still holding a photo of her daughter in her hand. When she woke up again, she was floating in the air, watching her husband Zhang Liang run into the emergency room after losing a shoe, watching her best friend Li Ting pick her nails until they bled, watching her brother Chen Lei standing outside the door smoking half a pack of cigarettes and not daring to go in, watching her mother putting vegetables into an empty bowl, and her father driving a bus around the city.
She couldn't go anywhere but watch.
Later she discovered that she could enter their dreams. In the dream, she could talk, hug, and ask with a smile if she was good today. So everyone began to look forward to going to bed - only when they were asleep could they see her. But every time I wake up, I have to accept that she is gone.
Zhang Liang's head turned white overnight, and his hands kept shaking when he held his daughter to feed her. The day Yiyi called his mother for the first time, he cried in his dream for half the night. When Li Ting got married, she left an empty space and placed a bunch of lisianthus. Chen Lei became the deputy director. Every time he solved a case, he would say to the air: Sister, is brother awesome? My mother talks to the photos every day. On the day my father retired, he went around to the downstairs of her unit and stopped for a while.
They all see her in their dreams and wake up to continue living.
And she just floated like that, watching them grow up, go to school, get married, and give birth to children one by one, watch her parents grow old and leave, and watch all the people who loved her slowly finish their lives. She could do nothing but watch.
Until the end, she held her daughter's hand and walked toward the light.
——I died, but I never left. I just changed my way to stay with you
