On the day Jiang Wan was buried, the first snow of that winter fell in the sky.
Lu Shen went to the cemetery because he was afraid of seeing the name carved into the cold stone stroke by stroke. He just stood on the balcony at home all day long, watching the busy traffic downstairs, thinking that Jiang Wan always used to lie here, took a breath, drew a smiling face on the glass, and said that he liked this lively human atmosphere the most.
But now, the world is still lively, but Jiang Wan is no longer there.
Everyone advised Lu Chen to look forward, saying that things would fade away as time goes by. Lu Shenwei retorted, he even acted calmer than anyone else. He followed Jiang Wan's example in cooking noodles and chopping green onions into fine pieces; he kept Jiang Wan's bedside lamp and habitually pressed the switch twice before going to bed every night; he went to the convenience store Jiang Wan frequented and bought the iced soda he liked to drink, even though he had a bad stomach and never drank cold drinks.
Lu Chen stubbornly maintained all this, as if as long as he didn't expose it, Jiang Wan would just go far away.
Until one day, when Lu Chen was sorting out his old things, he shook out a folded note from the pages of "The Little Prince".
It was Jiang Wan's handwriting, scrawled and panicked, with a line of words that had no beginning or end:
"Lu Chen, if I go to sleep first, can you please stop crying and don't wake up."
At that moment, the dam built by Lu Chen collapsed. He finally understood that Jiang Wan had planned this farewell long ago, but he was kept in the dark, like a fool, still waiting for a return date.
The most difficult thing to cross in this world is never the river of forgetfulness or the calamity, but the insurmountable gap between life and death.
On the other side of the bank, he tried his best to swim across, but the river was too wide and the night was too long. Jiang Wan had already fallen asleep on the other bank.
It turns out that the so-called "delayed crossing" is not that he came too late, but that he could no longer cross.
Every year since then, this long winter, this empty world, has been his delayed journey alone.
Purpose: to explore the boundaries of love and loss, to pay tribute to those souls who walk alone in extreme grief, and to write about the regret and long-lasting love in BE aesthetics.