My Dear Qingyun

Dear "Qingyun"

For ten years, I loved a "perfect" lie.

It turns out the only truth about marriage is that you become a stand-in actor in your spouse's life.

[One]

As Ji Songyu signed the divorce papers, he suddenly remembered a sunny afternoon ten years ago.

Xie Qingyun had turned from the library window and smiled at him:

"My name is Qingyun. Qing as in clear, Yun as in sunlight. It's a name I gave myself."

That was the first time Ji Songyu realized someone could use a name to complete a grand act of self-redemption.

But he didn't understand then that ten years later, he would pay the price for that redemption in the cruelest way.

[Two]

Xie Chengyang wrote the first entry in his imitation journal:

"July 15, sunny. Qingyun usually spins a pen with his left hand and bites the right side of his lower lip when thinking. I nearly gave myself away three times today."

He added calmly, "Ji Songyu doesn't seem to have noticed."

As the twin brother of "Xie Cheng'an," the younger sibling who had been ignored since childhood, Xie Chengyang spent twenty years envying his brother's healthy body, then another ten learning how to become him.

The family said it was for the sake of their interests.

The doctors said it was for the sake of stability.

But no one knew that when Ji Songyu unconsciously hugged him in the middle of the night and murmured "Qingyun," Xie Chengyang wished for the first time that he really could become the person blessed by sunlight.

[Three]

Ten years later, in a hospital corridor, Ji Songyu clutched a terminal diagnosis in one hand and a newly decrypted medical file in the other.

Two names were listed side by side:

Xie Qingyun (formerly Xie Cheng'an): severely injured in a car accident, transferred overseas for treatment, prognosis unknown.

Xie Chengyang: psychological assessment indicates severe identity confusion; isolation treatment recommended.

The first name appeared in the spouse field on his marriage certificate.

The second slept beside him on his pillow.

[Four]

The truth was a shattered mirror.

In its fragments, Ji Songyu saw:

The "Qingyun" who had held an umbrella for him on campus, his eyes bright as stars.

The "husband" who grew increasingly gloomy after their marriage and began to despise everything Ji Songyu had touched.

The two images slowly overlapped in his memory, then split apart along an irreparable fault line:

The two people he had loved had never been the same person.

[Five]

In the last three months of his life, Ji Songyu did three things:

First, he flew across the Pacific and took a distant look at the real Xie Qingyun outside a cafe. He was pushing a stroller, a strange ring on his ring finger.

Second, he returned to their empty marital home and bundled ten years of medical records, financial irregularities, and two love letters written in completely different handwriting into a file titled Proof of Existence.

Third, he scheduled it to be sent: twenty-four hours after his heart stopped, the file would appear in the boardroom inboxes of two companies and the inboxes of three investigative news outlets.

Meanwhile, in an isolation ward at a psychiatric hospital, Xie Chengyang kept practicing the smile he would never learn to wear, staring at the blurred glass.

He was already a prisoner, but he didn't know that the key to his cell had been swallowed by him the day he decided to become someone else.

[Six]

Many years later, Xie Qingyun recovered his memories and returned to his homeland.

He stood for a long time before Ji Songyu's grave. There was no photograph on the headstone, only one line:

"Here lies one who proved through his life that Xie Qingyun existed."

The sea breeze blew, and he suddenly remembered the young man who had told him in the library years ago, "I want to remember you."

It turned out someone really had spent his whole life keeping a promise as light as a feather.

Only, he had fulfilled it by sacrificing himself.

"Will you keep loving the familiar stranger, or find your way back to the stranger you love?"

"When the person beside you becomes an elaborate lie, will you choose to sleep on, or set yourself alight to reveal the truth?"

Couple: Ji Songyu, clear-eyed truth-seeker resolved to die, VS Xie Chengyang, lost in dual identities and imprisoned by himself / Xie Qingyun, the very person whose existence is proven by love

A cruel deconstruction of identity, memory, and existence, about three lonely souls trapped in the name of "love."

Theme: The essence of love is proof