Begonia Is Gone

The begonias are in full bloom in April, but no one knows that this is the beginning of their withering. Yu Haitang sat in the glass room for simultaneous interpretation for the last time, with Chu Yan's favorite old song playing in the headphones. She couldn't speak any words and could only watch the world outside the glass blur a little bit - just like the ripples on the water that day when Chu Yan jumped into the lake. Ji Ze, a Chinese medicine doctor, said that her pulse was like a kite with a broken string, but she didn't know that the person with the broken string was himself. In the deepest part of his medicine cabinet, there is a prescription that has never been given away, which reads: Angelicae Sinensis, Hehuan, and Wangyou. But the angelica has not returned, the joy of acacia has dispersed, and forgetfulness has become the cruelest irony. Duan Heng's scalpel could cut through the flesh, but it couldn't cut through the knots between the three people. When he saw Chu Yan's pale face in the emergency room, he suddenly remembered that when she was seven years old, she stood on tiptoe and pinned Begonia to his white coat. He kept that piece of clothing for twenty years and finally covered Ji Ze's cold body. That spring, when the first begonia fell, no one heard the sound. Later, the crabapple at the door of the clinic never bloomed again. Duan Heng still habitually makes three cups of tea every morning, waits for it to cool down, and then pours it out cup after cup. The wind outside the window passes through the empty courtyard, like someone is softly translating dialects about love and death that can no longer be spoken.