She Left the Key in 2046

Apartment 2046, in an old residential complex. The day she moved out, she left a spare key above the doorframe. A small piece of tape was stuck to it, with a faint line of writing.

When the next tenant moved in, he felt the key above the doorframe. He didn't throw it away, but put it in a drawer. Later, he opened the drawer and saw the words: "If you've found this key, it means I'm no longer in 2046."

He didn't know who she was. But he began piecing her together from the traces she'd left in the room: a pale square mark on the windowsill, as if a flowerpot had once stood there; an old shirt hanging at the back of the wardrobe; a note in the bedside table drawer that read, "Milk, eggs, green peppers, noodles." The things she hadn't had time to take with her described someone he hadn't had the chance to meet.

This could have been nothing more than a quiet coincidence: she moved out, he moved in, and they shared the same room at different times. But the words she'd left on the key set this clue winding around another: she'd come back from the future. She'd transmigrated to the room in 2046, left the key, then gone. She knew he would move in, and that one day he would read the note. What she didn't know was whether he would come looking for her after reading it. And under the same light in the room in 2046, she was waiting for someone whose arrival was uncertain, someone coming toward this door, still ajar, from another timeline.

She left the key in 2046. He found it in 2026. And in 2046, she was still waiting.