On the forty-third day of Fang Yuan's unemployment, at two o'clock in the morning, he was working the night shift at a convenience store. A woman pushed the door open and came in with wet hair. She bought a piece of bread and searched her pockets but couldn't find any money. He gave it to her. She said: "People who wash their hair at two o'clock in the morning probably had a bad day." That was He Man.
She lived on the sixth floor opposite and had just moved out of a relationship. He lives next door and has been in the water for a long time. Neither of them knew how to float, but they found each other in the convenience store that early morning.
No one saves anyone. No dramatic twists. But every late night, she would come and he would be there. Eating instant noodles on the steps, drinking hot water in front of the cashier, occasionally touching my fingers, and occasionally waiting until dawn. They talked about work, their exes, and the rice ball wrappers they folded and put away in their wallets. Together they watched the river rise and recede, changed leaky cups together, and learned to say "see you tomorrow" without actually leaving.
This is a book about "sinking", but also a book about "slowly floating up". There are no ups and downs in the plot, only the small warm yellow light in the convenience store in the early morning, the moment when two people confirm each other's existence in the dark, and that sentence——
"The deep sea is the most cosmic place, and we are all lonely planets."
Later they discovered that two lonely planets, close enough together, would also produce gravitational pull.
Far away in the long night, close to each other.
