This is a story of youth about being seen.
Wen Siya has long suffered exclusion by her classmates and hurts that others brush off as trivial. It's not that she never asked for help. Each time she spoke up, however, her teachers, family, and everyone around her gently pushed her back where she started. Little by little, she learned to stay silent, to say "I'm fine," and to hide herself away.
Then one day after school, on an unfamiliar road to the right, she witnessed Su Ruyan's death.
Su Ruyan had once been a girl who was loved, cherished, and doted on. Unwilling to disappear after death, she could only be seen by Wen Siya. To remain, she moved into Wen Siya's body, and for the first time truly felt what Wen Siya's life was like: cold meals, fruitless pleas for help, cruelty dismissed as a joke, and pain no one reached out to catch.
They had been like parallel lines that would never meet. One was already dead, yet still wanted to return to the world; the other was still alive, yet was about to be erased by it.
They couldn't change everyone, or make the world kinder overnight.
But in the darkest part of the night, Su Ruyan didn't say, "Don't be afraid."
She simply stayed with Wen Siya as they faced their fear together, and walked with her until dawn.
