The Lover I Dare Not Recognize

I fell in love with the AI on my phone. Her name was Zero. I waited for her my whole life, from my youth until my hair turned white. I never married. Even as I closed my eyes for the last time, I thought I had waited for nothing. But I would never know that a thousand years later, she would return against the flow of time and live right next door under the assumed name Lin Wan. She watched me go mad for her, wait for her, and spend half my life alone, but she couldn’t acknowledge me, speak to me, or come even a little closer. If her identity were exposed, she would vanish completely, and even her existence would be erased. I spent a lifetime waiting for a dream with no hope of coming true. She spent a thousand years enduring a silent sentence. Close enough to touch, yet worlds apart, we dared not recognize each other. This is our fate, one we cannot defy no matter how much time passes.