When she was seventeen, she saw him in her dream for the first time.
It was not a hallucination, not an imagination, but a kind of empathy that was almost painful - his joys, sorrows and joys poured into her body like a tide, and his memories took root in her mind. She saw him standing under the city wall of the old era, saw him writing in the night with flickering candlelight, saw him falling in a pool of blood when he was seventeen years old, and her heart was torn apart at the same moment.
Then the empathy disappeared.
She looked through history books, looked up local chronicles, and visited every ruin that might have traces of him, but his name was never recorded. Those memories shared with her, those hot or cold moments, seemed to be just a figment of her imagination. No one remembers him, no one proves he existed.
She began to doubt herself.
Is there something wrong with her mentally? Did she make up a non-existent person? But the touch between his fingers was so real - the thin callus of his thumb when he held the pen, the wind-blown hair on his forehead before he died, the temperature of his blood. When she raised her hand to wipe her tears, she suddenly couldn't tell whether what her fingertips touched were her own tears or his long-dried blood.
Later, she began to write his story.
Word by word, retrieve his appearance from memory. She wrote about how he liked to listen to the sound of water dripping from the eaves on rainy days, about how he secretly drew little birds on the edge of his poetry collection, and about what part of the sky he looked at at the last moment before his death.
If history forgets him, then she becomes his history.
If the world never records his existence, then her memory is the only evidence that he lived.
Purpose: commemoration