Chapter 51: “Starting Over” Part 2

“It wasn’t a big deal.” Fu Tingli shrugged it off. “She just told me some things I didn’t know.”

“How did it make you feel?”

“I believe she wasn’t lying. But it felt like I only heard part of the truth. Anyway, I don’t believe she’s as bad as she made herself out to be.”

“Exactly. Looks like she was right—those words of hers haven’t scared you off yet, at least.”

Fu Tingli set her crutches beside the wooden bench and slowly eased herself down onto it. “Didn’t Doctor Li say you don’t like giving compliments?”

“Depends on the situation.” Li Qiao glanced toward a certain window in the building, where a curtain was slowly being drawn. She smiled, then turned back to Fu Tingli.

“So you’re not mad she’s hiding from you?”

“Oh, I am.” Fu Tingli leaned back against the bench, eyes half-closed as she soaked in the sun, admitting frankly, “But I’ve hidden from her plenty of times before. She must resent me for that deep down.”

Li Qiao clapped her hands, mimicking the sloth from Zootopia. “Ha! You two really are a perfect match—chasing each other back and forth, taking turns. Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Or should we sit down calmly, take turns pointing out each other’s faults, lay everything out logically and neatly?”

“You say you love me, I say I love you too, we apologize, hug it out, and just like that, we’re together without a single grudge? Is that what love is?”

“I’ve never met anyone quite so clear-sighted as you.”

“It’s not that I’m clear-sighted.” Fu Tingli lazily raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun and looked toward the window Li Qiao had just glanced at.

“Maybe it’s just that I’ve always felt…”

After a long pause, she seemed to see something. She smiled brightly.

“Love was never meant to be something so rigid.”

~~~

In the days that followed, Kong Liyuan still refused all visitors. But Fu Tingli kept coming.

When Kong Liyuan wouldn’t see her, she crutched around the garden. When she got tired, she found the sunniest, most visible spot under the inpatient building and soaked in the rays.

The doctors said sunlight helped with calcium absorption after a fracture.

With her leg injured, she couldn’t report for duty with Wen Yingxiu back home anyway.

Occasionally, she asked the patients in their pure white hospital gowns milling about the garden.

She inquired about what Kong Liyuan was like during her previous stays, how the sanatorium was, and when patients typically got discharged.

One time, the manic patient who had been escorted away before showed up again. This time, she carried no pen—just a flimsy sheet of white paper.

She seemed perfectly fine, just a bit more animated than the others. Spotting Fu Tingli, her eyes lit up. She grinned and called out,

“Hey, my Muse!”

Fu Tingli ignored her and started to crutch away. The woman trailed after her, sounding aggrieved.

“Why won’t you talk to me, my Muse?”

Fu Tingli said nothing.

The woman hurried to keep up. “Muse, you’re not mad at me, are you? I really, really didn’t mean to hurt you! I was just scared those bad people would harm you, so I wanted to protect you! Don’t ignore me!”

Fu Tingli itched to slam her crutch into the woman’s head, to crack that grinning skull open.

But remembering she was a patient, she silently recited the Great Compassion Mantra in her mind. Then, with forced patience, she said,

“You hurt my lover. Why should I talk to you?”

“Lover?” The woman scoffed at the word but stuck to Fu Tingli’s heels, arms spread wide in dramatic questioning.

“Is your lover more precious than the Muse?”

“Of course!” Fu Tingli said solemnly. “The Muse is a goddess. A lover is human.”

The woman clearly couldn’t grasp such a profound, abstract—even philosophical—statement. She scratched her head. “What’s the difference between a goddess and a human?”

Fu Tingli stopped.

With some effort, she tilted her head back, found the window Li Qiao had pointed out, and saw someone standing there, faintly visible through the closed glass.

That person seemed to be looking down at her, head bowed.

Fu Tingli finally felt like smiling—even with this oblivious, love-blind woman standing beside her.

“Goddesses can’t be bad. But humans can.”

“Well said!” A voice applauded from behind. Li Qiao strolled up leisurely.

“So, since your lover’s hiding from you out of fear right now, want to come see your past lover with me?”

~~~

Past lover?

Puzzled, Fu Tingli followed Li Qiao into her office. In front of an old TV, Li Qiao rummaged around and finally unearthed a dusty DVD. She shook off the layer of grime, and sunlight streaming through the window filled the air with swirling motes of dust.

Fu Tingli coughed violently from the cloud.

When the coughing fit ended, she straightened up—and there, in the grainy recording, she saw exactly what Li Qiao had mentioned.

Her past lover.

“I just dug this up myself. She must have been about fifteen or sixteen then.”

Li Qiao’s voice suddenly seemed distant, muffled as if coated in dust, hard to make out clearly.

Fu Tingli could only make out three words clearly: Kong Liyuan.

Fifteen or sixteen—that was over a decade ago, back in the early 2000s. The old recording was low-resolution and heavily pixelated, the colors faded like old photographs.

Yet the Kong Liyuan in the videotape was so vividly alive.

Gray-blue light and shadow flickered across her body. She wore the blue-and-white hospital gown from back then.

Her outline seemed edged with a soft fuzz, her features not yet fully opened up—youthful and green.

Her hair was a tangled mess, lightly tinged with gold, the tip of her nose catching a gleam of brilliant golden sunlight.

She sat on a long wooden bench, basking in the sun, her whole body languid as she gazed up at a sky so blue it bordered on white.

“What are you doing?”

The filmmaker slowly approached, the camera lens swaying shakily along, settling on Kong Liyuan’s upper body before posing the question.

The wind in the video blew fiercely, billowing her hospital gown until it looked ready to sweep her away.

But she simply laughed with unbridled joy, a bright curve blooming on her lips, her entire face radiating a wild, carefree spirit.

“I just saw a little golden bird.”

The person behind the camera laughed. “Where would a golden bird come from around here?”

“It’s real,” Kong Liyuan insisted stubbornly, her eyes curving into delighted crescents as she grinned.

“It was all fluffy and tiny, but so cute and beautiful. As it flew past, it sprinkled a handful of rice grains for me. It didn’t know my name or even recognize me, but it lingered for me just a little while.

“It would only stop for me alone—because it’s mine alone. It only wants to see me. Once you came over, it flew right over my head, so you missed it.”

“That’s a real shame,” the voice from behind the camera replied.

“What’s shameful about it? Not shameful at all.”

Kong Liyuan sprang to her feet, suddenly bathed in a hazy golden halo.

The camera tilted upward. From her vantage point above, Kong Liyuan laughed with radiant exuberance, even through the low-resolution pixels, as if nothing in the world could hold her back.

“In the whole world, I’m the only one who can encounter it. So I’ll go find it myself.”

With those words, she spun around and ran off. The video closed with a motion-blurred glimpse of her back, then cut abruptly to a black screen.

“That’s all there is,” Li Qiao said. “It was just a treatment record left by one of the attendants back then.”

Fu Tingli stared into the pitch-black screen, where her own face was reflected back at her. And yet, it didn’t feel like her face at all—she saw only Kong Liyuan there.

Fifteen or sixteen years old, over a decade ago, right here in this sanatorium. Kong Liyuan had still carried that fresh spark of childhood.

Much like the person Fu Tingli had once met—the one who endlessly proclaimed herself “the greatest composer of the 21st century.”

Youthful eccentricity, innocent madness, spouting utter nonsense.

She seemed utterly unlike the Kong Liyuan of today. And yet, somehow, they both concealed the same thread of loneliness.

This was her past lover.

“I want to watch it again,” Fu Tingli said suddenly.

Li Qiao replayed it for her. Only after the tape had looped several times did Fu Tingli finally speak, her voice measured after a long pause.

“I had no idea she was already sick at such a young age.”

“That’s something she needs to tell you herself,” Li Qiao replied. “Truth be told, I find it odd too. You know there are plenty of public videos of her from childhood, ones tied to her father or mother.”

“None of them match this version of her,” Fu Tingli said, her lips pressed thin.

“Exactly.” Li Qiao nodded, her tone gentle as she continued. “She was definitely in a manic phase during that time, but in a way, this period brought out a different kind of charm in her.”

Fu Tingli thought back to the final moment on the tape—the fierce glint in Kong Liyuan’s eyes as she leapt up and declared from on high, “I’ll go find it.”

All at once, that gaze felt achingly familiar, like the countless looks Kong Liyuan had given her over the years.

Fu Tingli had always believed she couldn’t decipher them.

Now she understood. It was like the dark side of the Earth, turned away from the sun in its rotation—a faint signal pulsing out into the vast cosmos from that shadowed hemisphere.

But were those two sides truly divided by such sharp lines?

No. They weren’t.

Fu Tingli was certain the boundary had never been so clear-cut.

Lines of longitude and latitude crisscrossed the globe in endless multiplicity. In some sense, they could slice the Earth into any number of hemispheres.

No one could definitively say which half was good and which was bad. Nor could anyone pinpoint exactly which side they themselves occupied.

With that realization snapping her from her reverie, Fu Tingli looked at Li Qiao with earnest sincerity. “Doctor Li Qiao, I need you to do me a favor.”

As she stepped out of Li Qiao’s office, golden sunlight enveloped her completely.

She trod upon her own crooked, wavering shadow. She’d meant only to dwell on the Kong Liyuan from the tape, but memories of her younger self flooded in unbidden.

She recalled her twenty-year-old self, traversing the lush, crowded expanses of California, convinced she could measure the planet with her own two legs.

She remembered driving her old white car through that exhilarating dawn—and the collision with Kong Liyuan, who seared into her life amid the fluorescent gold of that breaking light.

Now she glanced down at her own shadow: hunched a little, bedraggled. With a sigh, she leaned harder on her crutch, hauling herself onward. Days of this had her convinced she was building actual muscle in her arms.

In a burst of whimsy, she jabbed the crutch’s flat, rounded tip viciously into her scrawny, aged-looking shadow.

Right then, her phone—silent for days—buzzed insistently to life. Fumbling it from her pocket with effort, she balanced on one leg to answer Qiao Lipan’s call.

Before Fu Tingli could speak, Qiao Lipan burst out from the other end.

“I’ve got some good news for you.”

~~~

After sending Fu Tingli on her way, Li Qiao went to find Kong Liyuan. She figured she’d bent over backward for this pair and deserved to fleece Kong Liyuan for it later.

But on second thought, how had she caught this? Just hearing “lover” had her assuming they were married.

With Kong Liyuan dodging her like this, could she even admit Fu Tingli was her lover?

Li Qiao decided to rat her out straightaway.

“If you keep avoiding her, she’ll tell the whole institute she’s your lover.”

Kong Liyuan stood at the window, peering through the foggy glass at the slow-moving figure on crutches down below, receding from view. She offered no answer to Li Qiao’s question.

Only when the crutches-wielding shape dwindled to a distant speck and vanished entirely did she turn her gaze to the photo taped to the nearby wall. A faint, fragile smile curved her lips.