—Dedicated to those who burned in ashes but were never remembered
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First volume
Years later, when I tried to recall all this, I discovered that memory is not a river as people say. It's more like ash—fine, dry, and pervasive. Things you thought you had long forgotten will seep out from the cracks at a certain moment, dyeing all the past events the same color.
Gray color.
The gray in London is no ordinary gray. Ordinary ashes are dead things, including burned charcoal, crushed soil, and disintegrated fibers. But London Gray is different. It is so light that it should not fall from the sky; and it is so heavy that once it is sucked in, it cannot be spit out again. The old people said that the ashes came up from the center of the earth because people had committed so many sins on earth that even hell could not hold them, so they overflowed from the cracks in the earth. Younger people said that it was the poison left over from the war years, the embers carried by the wind after weapons whose names were not even allowed to be mentioned exploded in unknown places.
No one knows the truth. It doesn't matter anymore.
Only one thing matters: ashes are always falling.
When you wake up in the morning, there is a thick layer on the windowsill; when you take a nap at noon, you wake up with fine powder on your lips; when you lie down at night, you can hear the sound of ash falling on the roof - it is not the sound of rain, it is lighter and denser than rain, as if there are countless invisible fingers, crushing the world into powder bit by bit at the slowest speed.
In such a world, living is nothing more than delaying the process of turning into ashes.
But I'm still alive.
