Cheng Yuan once thought that the cruelest thing in life is forgetting.
Until he remembered everything.
A car accident caused Cheng Yuan and his girlfriend Xu Anning, who had been in love for many years, to lose their memory. They were reminded that they had been lovers, but could no longer find evidence of their love for each other, and eventually broke up peacefully. Two years later, Cheng Yuan's memory unexpectedly recovered. He frantically searched for Xu Anning, bringing a moldy old tape with her to revisit the places where she had left beautiful memories - the noodle shop, the top of the mountain, the rain alley, and the house that he failed to buy with a down payment of 40,000 yuan. What he didn't know was that Xu Anning had already recovered his memory, but he was terminally ill and didn't have much time left, so he chose to push him away with silence.
After Xu Anning passed away, Cheng Yuan forgot all this in his collapse. He met He An, a soft-spoken elementary school Chinese teacher, and rebuilt a peaceful life. Until fate showed its fangs again - He An was diagnosed with cancer. At the last moment of her life, she said the same last words as Xu Anning. Cheng Yuan's memories came flooding back. Two women who loved him deeply, two irreversible cancers, and the same sentence "I'm a little sleepy."
The moldy tape was still spinning, and the third song on side B called "August" was already out of tune. But the noise is also nice. Like waves, like breathing, like a very tired person talking. Like all the unspoken farewells, and all the promises that were too late to be fulfilled.
This is a story about memory and forgetting, fate and choice. It writes about the obsession with love, but also about letting go of love; it writes about the way fate folds, and also writes about the gentleness of people who refuse to bow their heads in the face of fate.
