In the funeral parlor, I took away Lin Xiaoyu's ashes and put them into an eighty-yuan beech box. No one knew that I had pried open the rooftop door, and no one knew that she turned back and silently said "thank you" to me before falling.
I thought I was the only one watching her until I opened the diary she had hidden in the mezzanine of the ceiling. She divided the secret into countless pieces - a lock, a letter, an earring buried under the osmanthus tree - and distributed them to observers at different times and in different corners. Following her clues, I found the "you in the hat", the math teacher who had photographed her back earlier, and the person who recorded every time she stopped when she was sixteen.
We have all been buried, dug, and waited in the root system of the same sweet-scented osmanthus tree. She addressed everyone who looked at her with the same phrase, "You're still there," cramming three people into the same pronoun. And I am the last recipient of the letter - completing the unreached conversation for her at the place where all the fragments gather.
Concept: Being seen is the only echo. Lonely people complete a silent arrival in the depths of time by looking at each other.