Sleepless at Mount Fuji

“Could you sing Under Mount Fuji one more time?

A late-night request in the bitter cold, wrapped in the ragged breaths crackling through the phone.

Meng Baiyun remembered Xuanwu Lake, where the girl in his arms had poked his Adam’s apple with her finger: “It vibrates here when you sing.”

Back then, the jade bangle on her wrist still gleamed with a warm luster, unlike the brittle crash of porcelain he heard over the phone now.

A phone takes 4.3 seconds to fall from the twenty-seventh floor, enough time for countless fragments of memory to flash by

When a work call cut off the song, he didn’t know that ten minutes was enough for red wine to dissolve a dose of tricyclic antidepressants. Just as he hadn’t known that on the night they broke up, beneath the blue light of the consulting room, a diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” had covered up a pregnancy test.

The broken jade bore witness as the camellia withered in love, while the trail of blood winding across the snow eventually formed the last answer they had missed.

Theme: Love yourself before loving another