Love You Before the Painkillers Wear Off

"Have you finished touching the Braille map?" Yaya was curled up on the train's couch, wrapped in a thick blanket, watching Ji Xiaofan put the travel book back into his pocket. He brushed the bumps on the album with his fingertips and smiled at the cool air seeping in through the cracks in the car window: "Daocheng is 3,650 meters above sea level, so you need to have double copies of oxygen bottles - you haven't settled the matter of hiding painkillers yet." After being diagnosed with advanced metastatic osteosarcoma, Yaya decided to return to her childhood town where she had lived for sixteen years. She met Ji Xiaofan again next to a park bench, who had been blind for many years. The blind cane lightly touched the tip of her shoe, and she subconsciously said sorry. Xiaofan tilted his head and listened for a long time, then asked with a smile: "You pushed me to grab hawthorn pills when you were a child, but now you don't even dare to let me recognize your voice?" On the night of their reunion, he held her trembling hand and gently pressed it on his face: "I have a bad memory, so I have to get to know you again." The green-skinned train to Tibet clanged, and Yaya lay in front of the sink and vomited. Ji Xiaofan pressed his blind stick against the constantly shaking compartment door and squatted next to her: "The flight attendant said there are still four stops, enough for you to vomit your stomach and put it back in." She splashed water on him: "You can't see how you can read the map like someone else?" "You turned the navigation sound on your phone so loud, the flight attendant thought I was listening to an audio novel." There was too much wind and snow near Namtso Lake, and they ultimately did not reach their original location. Ji Xiaofan helped Yaya sit down on a bench sheltered from the wind, and took out the oximeter and painkillers: "The big brother who gave us directions just now said that there is a bench two hundred steps east of the prayer wheel - but this is enough for today." Yaya looked at the lake in the distance and put her hand on the cold railing: "Then let me tell you. The lake is blue today and the wind is white." In the hospital in Sanya, Yaya finished the supportive infusion and went to the beach with Ji Xiaofan in the evening. Ji Xiaofan stood where the tide could just touch the tip of his shoes and asked: "What is the sea like?" Yaya grabbed a handful of wet sand and poured it into his shoes: "It's as salty as chemotherapy medicine." Seeing him raising his feet to hide, she added: "But the sun was very warm, just like the afternoon we first stole loquats from the hospital." For the last three months, they returned to the old city. Ji Xiaofan held the handle of the wheelchair, and Yaya pointed out the steps and turns for him. The two of them slowly crossed the bumpy old road. At the gate of the garden, Yaya started to cheat again: "Carry me in, you broke a glass sugar bowl here back then." "Then you took three injections of tetanus for me." He touched the crooked mark along the door frame, and then held her wrist to count her pulse. "It was just as fast as that time." On Christmas Eve, the monitor alarm sounded throughout the ward. Ji Xiaofan fumbled and put the grass ring on her ring finger: "The owner of the gold shop said that the plating can last for three years without fading." Yaya gently wrapped the oxygen tube around his wrist: "That's enough... The painkillers I hid are in the middle of the suitcase. It's not that I don't want to take them, I just don't want you to be scared every time." On the day of the cremation, Ji Xiaofan sat on a park bench and counted the 147 passing cars. The caregiver later handed him two Braille diaries left by Yaya. There is a piece of dried loquat leaf sandwiched in the cover. Some of the bumps on the thick paper have become soft from repeated touching. One is about the years they missed, and the other is about the road they have traveled together. The map will always be touched, but Yaya wants to tell him: Those who reach the end do not have to stop there forever. Concept: The real terminal illness is not death, but the failure to carve each other's looks into the bones and blood