Twin Key

At three o'clock in the morning, when Lin Xia was wiping the fog in front of the bathroom mirror, ripples suddenly appeared on the mirror. The self in the mirror is wearing the uniform of the art school that she gave up applying for. On the easel is the painting "Spring Wild Sky" that was never completed due to the sudden death of her father. The lips of the person in the mirror moved, but the voice came from behind Lin Xia: "You are finally here, the coward tamed by reality." In the world outside the mirror, Lin Xia clutched the faded critical illness notice - the volunteer form rewritten by her father before his death was still locked in the drawer. In the mirror world, the lights in the operating room were bright, the electrocardiograph was beating steadily, and the calendar on the wall of the studio was stuck on the day she gave up the art exam. When the person in the mirror raised a paintbrush stained with cobalt blue paint, Lin Xia found that the other person's wrist did not have the burn scar left by working to raise medical expenses. "Do you hate me?" The person in the mirror suddenly pressed the palette knife against the mirror, "I have reserved all possibilities for you." Where the tip of the knife scratched, blood with the smell of turpentine oozed from the mirror. Lin Xia touched the mirror tremblingly, but felt the texture of her father's medical record on the glass - the memories of the two worlds began to flow back in both directions: she saw herself in the mirror kneeling in front of her father's hospital bed, making sketches, while in the real world, at the age of eighteen, she was incinerating the oil paints together with the admission notice in the funeral parlor. When the morning light penetrated the mirror, Lin Xia discovered that the canvas behind the person in the mirror had become a double exposure: the upper layer was her graduation creation that she had never finished painting, and the lower layer was the boring architectural drawings she designed in the real world. The paints of the two worlds were seeping into each other, and the person in the mirror suddenly grabbed her wrist: "You take away the color, and I will bear the grayscale for you." At the moment the mirror shattered, Lin Xia saw the ultimate truth - all the splendor of the world in the mirror comes from the nutrients accumulated in regrets in the real world. She picked up the fragments and scratched them towards her design. The unfinished tube of ultramarine paint began to ooze out from where the carbon pen line drawing was cut.