Ye Zixin, Waiting for You as Always

Love in the dark night always has barbs of thorns, and those stings spread into the blood vessels and turn into tides swimming in the bone marrow. Freedom smells of rust, like the blood that gushed out when my father chopped me. Ye Xin's dialog box always lights up at the top of the phone. We hugged each other to keep warm as the Christmas bells rang, and her scarf was stained with the fragrance of pine needles and cinnamon. But when the feast finally came to an end, the broadcast on the platform was like a scalpel cutting through the intertwined body heat. Now we are 760 kilometers apart, and the words beating in the chat records are like the charcoal fire that is about to go out in the winter night. We take turns breathing and guarding this weak light. The train is passing through a long tunnel, and the cell phone signal grid is dimmed into ashes. I suddenly remembered that the frost on her eyelashes reflected the shape of stars under the streetlight. Perhaps love is a long exile, and we use our thoughts to weave ropes of escape on our respective latitude and longitude lines.