[Xiao Qing] The Phoenix's Mistake

“The distant, distant spirit phoenix, forever returning. My thoughts drift on and on, forever at odds with my wishes. Endless are the kalpas; when will you take flight again?” Only when the youth, whose face seemed vaguely familiar, told me his age did I suddenly realize that I had already spent nineteen years here. Nineteen years frozen in ice, nineteen years of sorrow and resentment, nineteen years of youth swept away like water. Every day for those nineteen years, I relived the same dream and the same calamity that I could neither escape nor evade. I gazed at the innocent, guileless youth before me. It felt as though my encounter with that person had happened only yesterday. But the one I once knew was gone.