[A short story, told in first person]
Xie Liang never got to eat the roasted pig trotters I bought for him before he died.
His parents sent him to a “conversion therapy center” because he liked me. He died there.
I went to claim his body, but his parents called the police.
When I got out of the police station, his younger brother gave me his ashes and a photograph.
It was a picture of Xie Liang and me in front of a wheat field. On the back, he had written: “Meeting you was the best fortune I could have asked for.”
I had a copy of that photo too, and I had written something on the back: “If we share this snowfall today, then in this life, we have shared a lifetime together.”
It had been snowing heavily when we took the picture.
I thought we were both idiots. It turned out we had liked each other since our second year of high school, but we let several years slip by for nothing.
I bought a grave for him and another for myself beside it. I thought that if he waited for me at the Bridge of Hel, our graves were so close that we could hold hands and be reborn together.
That day, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was back in my second year of high school, and Xie Liang was standing right in front of me, alive and well.
Theme: Healing one another and building a harmonious interstellar society
