Across the Tracks

If losing someone is inevitable, would you still choose to meet them?

He has less than a year left.

She has crossed time and space to say goodbye.

On the last subway train in Shanghai, she falls into a strange dream.

In the dream, she is still the girl secretly photographing his back beneath a maple tree at Peking University. His name is Shen Yan, a young law student at Peking University whose smile is like autumn.

When she wakes, she finds herself really standing in Beijing, now a student at Renmin University.

She starts going to Peking University and sitting in on his classes, pretending to run into him at his favorite noodle shop, Starry Sky. On the first page of her notebook, she writes just one line: “Get into his university.” But she knows all too well that he has less than a year left in this world.

Until…

Some trains can never return to their original tracks.

Still, she gets into Peking University.

In the season when the maple leaves turn red, she sees the back of someone in a white shirt. He turns his face toward her from across a carpet of fallen leaves.

She stands where she is and does not go to him.