My name is Chen Nini. I'm thirty-seven, a Virgo, and an INFJ.
I have a husband, a child, and a company of my own. In everyone's eyes, I'm the one who has it all "together."
I thought my life would continue just like this, proper and correct, all the way to the end.
Until I met her online.
She was six years younger than me, a Pisces, with short hair and a height of 174 centimeters. She was from Shandong and had the look of a "man."
From 1,400 kilometers away, she saw right through me, through the "other me" locked inside my body for eleven years, the one I didn't even dare admit existed.
She said Virgo and Pisces were opposite signs on the birth chart, 180 degrees apart, gazing at each other from afar.
People fall in love with those who are their opposite because they see in the other person the self they once strangled with their own hands.
That was the first time I learned that having someone understand your soul could make you cry.
Later, someone told me that feeling was called a "brain orgasm."
I ran marathons for her, went to concerts alone, and panicked so badly in a basement parking garage in a rainstorm that I could hardly breathe.
I thought our souls had recognized each other, that our fates had been carved into the Three Lives Stone.
But little by little, I realized that I was never the one she looked up to.
She was obsessed with Zhao Yazhi because Zhao Yazhi was a Scorpio.
The lotus on her back, the date on her wrist, the house she mortgaged, and the half-life she had once nearly ended by hanging herself all belonged to another Scorpio, one who had gone to Beijing.
The "Zhi-Tong" pairing she'd shipped all her life had turned out to be a story about herself all along.
And I, Chen Nini, from beginning to end,
was nothing but a stand-in brought in for this one-woman show, someone who could be replaced at any moment.
I didn't even lose to one particular person.
This is a story about souls and redemption, sex and love, reality and illusion.
The first half is about two people recognizing each other as they fly into the flames. The second half is about how, after being utterly shattered,
I piece my broken self back together with my own hands, bit by bit, and bring myself home.
So the other me I crossed mountains and rivers to find had been living inside my own body all along.
Premise: A woman comes to understand herself in a passionate and dangerous relationship, breaks free of her obsession, and ultimately heals and grows. She learns to love herself and return to her life.
