[The green plums wither, the bamboo horses are in ruins, you are the only one who is my glimmer of light through the thorns]
When he was seven years old, He Yinghuai put fireflies in a glass jar and gave them to Shen Zhili: "From now on, I will be your star, and you will be my koi carp." But on a rainy night at the age of sixteen, when her textbooks were torn into pieces and thrown into the sewage pool, the boy turned off his phone on the flight to Boston. It wasn't until she was completely soaked and taken away by Jiang Jinbai under an umbrella that she realized that the stars would extinguish and the abyss would disguise itself as a safe haven.
Jiang Jinbai spent three years raising her as a greenhouse rose, but the moment the experimental drug "Wangchuan" was injected into her veins, all the memories about the stars were turned into powder. When Shen Zhili stood on tiptoe and kissed the collar button of her white coat, she had no idea that beneath that gentle face was a marriage contract to a rich man's daughter.
We met again at the airport five years later. He Yinghuai, who was already a brain scientist, clutched the "retrograde amnesia" diagnosis on her case, and ran his fingertips across the unhealed pinhole on her collarbone: "Lili, what you lost is not the memory, but someone deliberately cut off our time." When the prenatal checkup form slipped from her bag, Jiang Jinbai was holding his pregnant fiancée, and inserted the wedding ring into the deepest part of her pupil.
"I have been studying the hippocampus all my life, but I can't solve this question - how many grams of dopamine do I need to make you fall in love with me again?" When He Yinghuai wrote this sentence in his experimental diary, Shen Zhili was in trance looking at the firefly specimens all over the wall. The dates on the bottom of those glass jars actually exactly coincided with the starry sky photos she had collected inexplicably over the years...
Intent: Philosophical questioning of memory as self, double criticism of violence in the name of love,