"The Ninth Day of September"

On the day he ascended the throne, he locked me up with his own hands. I am his shadow guard. I have killed people, blocked knives, and bitten tongues for him. The civil and military officials of the Manchu Dynasty handed me seventeen folds to kill me. He burned the folds and made a chain. One end was cuffed on my wrist and the other was tied to the pillar. The chain is long enough for me to reach the window, but not the door. He comes every night. Apply medicine, blow on the lamp, and leave a mark below my collarbone. Just as the old is fading away, the new is coming over. On the ninth day of September of the following year, he unlocked the first link. The third year, the second ring. The chain is getting shorter and shorter every year, and I am getting closer to him every year. The sixth year, the final link. He completely untied the chain, turned his back and said, "Let's go." The door is open. Begonia is blooming. I stood for a long time. Then he walked back, cuffed the chain on his wrist again, and handed the other end to him. He did not tie the post back. He tied it around his wrist. Two people, one chain, a lifetime. Later the chain became rusty and the key was lost. No one mentioned the seventeen deadly sins again. Every year when the crabapples are in bloom, he sits under the tree and reviews the poems, while I kneel by the desk and study ink. The chain connected the wrists of two people, changing from copper to gold, from six years to a lifetime. He asked me, Ah Jiu, are you not leaving or are you unable to leave? I wrote in his palm: You are here. Wherever I go. Seven steps is too far. Just right here. Intention: The door is open. Begonia is blooming. The chain is untied. I won't leave. Did I imprison him, or did he imprison me? Or do we imprison each other as our own destinations? Seven steps is too far, but this is just right. The real imprisonment is not the chain, but the weight he placed on my shoulder that night, the bite marks on his tiger's mouth, and the sound of the gold chains between their wrists hitting the inkstone when I was grinding ink for him. We are imprisoned by each other, and this imprisonment is what we call home. Ultimate idea: Love is a voluntary lock He locked me up to protect me. I kept him to guard him. In the end, the chain was forged by two people, one at each end, and no one really opened it. The deepest prison in the world is not a chain, it is when one person lives in another person's life, and the other person is willing to throw away the key.