For the first seven nights, I called my dead lover's phone number.
... It actually got connected.
From the receiver, the familiar sound of his breathing came from when he was seriously ill.
"It's raining," I choked.
The breathing paused, as if in response.
But after hanging up, the call record showed that the number I dialed was a non-existent number.
My name is Shen Tingyu, and my lover Jiang Jin is a painter.
He spent his whole life painting things that were destined to disappear: morning mist, epiphyllum, and melting snow.
He said: "It is precisely because we cannot retain it that we must remember it."
After he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he started a secret "Unfinished Plan".
It wasn't until after the funeral that his friend handed me an envelope: "Jiang Jin asked me to wait until you make that phone call to him before opening it."
Inside is the first "relic" he left me:
A note with very light handwriting——
"If you get through, don't talk. Let me listen to your breathing again.
The most regretful thing in this life is that I can no longer watch the rain with you. "
Later, I began to look for the clues he had hidden: a painting that sealed our first encounter with ginkgo leaves and gardenia petals, an eavesdropping recording of the first time I said I loved him, a puzzle that pointed to the taste of a bowl of instant noodles when we were poor...
Every exploration is carefully planned by him.
It turns out that his greatest work is not any painting.
Instead, he spent the last half year of his life carefully designing this long farewell for me——
He used death as paint and the rest of my life as canvas.
He wanted me to follow the traces of love, uncover all the lies with my own hands, and finally learn to continue living in a world without him.
"Tingyu, don't be afraid of my disappearance."
"Remember me like you remember a rain, okay?"
Intention: Gradually get out of the past