Carry Me Through Spring

[Content warnings]

1. Not a conventional sweet romance. The tone is heavy and oppressive, and the story centers on the soul's salvation in the face of death.

2. Told entirely from Yuan Jiang's first-person perspective, so readers have limited information and must infer Luo Shidu's thoughts.

3. Deals with terminal illness, including extensive descriptions of illness and medical scenes, as well as questions of life and death.

4. Yuan Jiang is emotionally numb and self-deprecating for a long time. Luo Shidu seems carefree on the surface, but is deeply troubled underneath.

I set the time display to one day because I finished writing this three months ago and have been revising it ever since, but never posted a word. Now I'm finally posting it! (^▽^ )

A short story~

In a place where life has begun its countdown, they learn how to truly live.

Fourteen-year-old Yuan Jiang is a withered tree. Ever since she was told at age seven that she "wouldn't live past twenty," her world has shrunk to the four walls of her hospital room. Numbness is the armor she uses against pain, and a wall that shuts out every emotion. She spends every day waiting for the end, until one autumn day, another girl is wheeled into her room.

Luo Shidu's arrival is like a light with no warning. The girl, the same age as Yuan Jiang, is pale and frail, yet carries a strange vitality. She gives colors poetic names, says pain is "silver strings playing a symphony," and describes the rhythm of breathing in shapes. In Yuan Jiang's eyes, Luo Shidu is like a gardener who has wandered into a withered forest, softly speaking to a tree that has long since given up growing.

"You are a seed wrapped in too many winters," Luo Shidu tells her. "An entire forest is hidden inside you."

In this white hospital room, two girls whose lives have been granted a stay of execution begin to build something: a shared "museum" notebook that records colors, sounds, and the shapes of pain; an invisible bridge linking the islands of their two beds; an imagined geography of oceans, forests, and rivers they can never reach, yet already call home in their hearts.

Yuan Jiang gradually discovers that when Luo Shidu takes her hand, the warmth she feels doesn't come from skin, but from a deeper current, slow and steady, connecting the sparks that refuse to go out in their slowly failing bodies.

With medical predictions looming over them and their bodies constantly reminding them of the end, they choose the gentlest form of rebellion: to love, to create, to bear witness, and with every difficult breath, to build an eternity of their own.

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