Chapter 21: 21. “My Ji, what’s making you so sad?” Part 1

The instant the alarm went off, Ji Qingyou’s hand, clutching the phone, was numbed by the vibration. She snapped her eyes open, her rapid heartbeat almost audible in her ears.

The room was still dark, faint light blocked by the curtains.

Her phone continued to vibrate. The familiar alarm sound pulled her scattered thoughts back. She reacted quickly, swiping the screen. There were no unread messages or missed calls.

The clean screen made her sigh with relief. She sank her head a little deeper into the soft pillow, squinted her eyes for a moment, then threw off the covers and got up from the bedroom bed.

The spot where she had bumped her leg earlier throbbed with a dull ache. Combined with the overexertion from climbing twenty-two floors in five minutes, her gait was a bit awkward today.

While brushing her teeth, she stared at her sleepy eyes in the mirror, thinking about the fragmented dreams from last night. Most of them were memories from high school, interspersed with fragments from after the graduation ceremony.

A sweltering summer day. Under the tall plane trees, the chirping of cicadas was still jarring amidst the busy traffic and crowds.

Yu Qinjiu’s eyes were lowered. Her long, delicate lashes caught the fresh sunlight but were also wet with tears. The carefree arrogance and pride in her eyes had died down to ashes in that summer.

She bit her lip hard, refusing to cry again. But after crying thousands of times in recent days, her voice was hoarse to the point of being nearly silent. “Do you still remember the night of the graduation ceremony…”

Ji Qingyou looked away, staring at the world of traffic. It wasn’t the season for plane tree fluff, but that day, she truly felt like the wind had blown a piece into her eyes, making them hurt so much she could barely breathe.

But she kept her fingers pressed into her palm, not letting Yu Qinjiu discover anything was wrong as she used to. Then, Yu Qinjiu would help her blow the dust from her eyes.

She almost masochistically let herself feel the pain, as if only this pain could mask the evasion and unease spreading through her mind, allowing her to softly utter that sentence.

“I don’t remember.”

After the kiss at the graduation ceremony, the one who claimed not to remember it wasn’t Yu Qinjiu, who was drunk that night, but Ji Qingyou herself, who hadn’t had a single drop of alcohol, was perfectly sober, and simply couldn’t admit it.

That was the summer ten years ago.

They hadn’t actually had a huge fight back then, nor had they spoken the words of their irreconcilable conflicts and crumbling ambiguity out loud. They had just, with mutual understanding, cut off contact after Yu Qinjiu went abroad.

This understanding was like a mark injected into their souls since the age of five. It deepened over the thirteen years they grew up together and hadn’t dissipated during the ten years they were apart.

So, after meeting again.

They maintained this same understanding. They didn’t bring up the kiss from after the graduation party. They didn’t sustain the ambiguity and distance born that summer. There were no questions or accusations after all this time, only mutual understanding from an old friendship reunited.

After this decade-long separation, the restraint and maturity of adulthood had reached its peak.

Ji Qingyou felt very fortunate about this. Because Yu Qinjiu hadn’t resented her for that little episode. Naturally, she wouldn’t bring it up with Yu Qinjiu, who was only staying in the country for two months. For Yu Qinjiu, perhaps she couldn’t be bothered, or perhaps too many things had happened in the past ten years, causing her to forget the little incident buried under so many major events.

In the year 2012, when their life paths diverged, this should and could only be an extremely small matter in Yu Qinjiu’s life.

If Yu Qinjiu could forget those things. If Yu Qinjiu could happily spend these two months of vacation in the country. If Yu Muzhou and Yu Cheng would stop disturbing Yu Qinjiu. If everything continued to roll forward on its predetermined path of fate. If the events of ten years ago didn’t resurface and return everything to calm… then that would be for the best.

It would be good for Yu Qinjiu.

It would also be good for Ji Qingyou, even if she and Yu Qinjiu would be separated again, at opposite ends of the world. She felt it was a good thing. Because ever since the end of the world in 2012, her life had been so calm it couldn’t even stir up a ripple.

She forced herself into this state of mind.

Until she went out the door at 7:30. The instant she closed her door, she noticed a plastic bag hanging on her doorknob. Inside was a steaming hot bowl of plain congee. A thin layer of mist on the transparent plastic bag showed it had been bought not long ago.

A small note was stapled to the bag’s handle. The handwriting was light, but the characters were very neat.

“The sun is out today, Dr. Ji. Remember to eat breakfast.”

The note wasn’t signed, but it was clearly in Yu Qinjiu’s handwriting. Even after living abroad for ten years, her Chinese handwriting hadn’t changed. And she had called her Dr. Ji.

Ji Qingyou picked up the congee. Before leaving, she glanced at the empty beer cans piled messily by the door opposite hers.

She pursed her lips, looking over a few more times as she passed. She reached out and pressed the elevator button. As she watched the elevator descend from the 33rd floor, her eyes fixed on the changing numbers, a word suddenly popped into her head:

Alcohol.

In these few meetings with Yu Qinjiu, she could feel that Yu Qinjiu seemed very dependent on alcohol. Whenever an emotion arose, whenever something happened, Yu Qinjiu seemed to need alcohol to relieve it.

This wasn’t a good thing.

Alcohol is very harmful to the human body. Arteriosclerosis, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral embolism, memory loss, cirrhosis… A flood of terms appeared in Ji Qingyou’s mind, scrolling like an automatic subtitle, making her unable to stop her brows from furrowing.

Yu Qinjiu could drink herself into a stupor among a group of strangers, and she could also spend her lonely, quiet nights relying on alcohol. Ji Qingyou couldn’t guess how many such nights and drunken episodes Yu Qinjiu had repeated over the past ten years.

But she couldn’t help wondering:

Was being abroad really better than staying in Nanwu?

Was it that being entangled with her inevitably brought double the pain to Yu Qinjiu?

She remembered yesterday when Yu Qinjiu saw Yu Muzhou at the hospital. If it weren’t for her, Yu Qinjiu might not have come to the hospital to see Yu Zhijiu. Maybe she wouldn’t have seen Yu Muzhou, and she wouldn’t have had so much happen later that night because of respiratory alkalosis…

“Ding—”

The elevator reached her floor, making a sound that interrupted her train of thought.

The elevator doors slowly opened. The person inside looked a bit impatient. “Aren’t you getting on?”

She snapped back to reality, instinctively taking a step forward, then stopped. She stepped in, apologizing to the person inside.

The doors closed again.

When she reached the ground floor, Ji Qingyou wandered around outside, looking for the breakfast place she frequented most. She stopped, then re-entered the residential complex, took the elevator back up, and returned to the door of 2202. She quietly arranged the messy empty beer cans neatly by the door.

Then she took out her pen, tore the note from the congee bag, and wrote a message on the back. She placed it under the breakfast and juice she had just bought.

She had to do something.

Even if Yu Qinjiu’s dependence on alcohol over the years was beyond her imagination. Even if she couldn’t truly empathize with the pain Yu Qinjiu felt in facing Yu Muzhou. Even if part of Yu Qinjiu’s pain was because of her.

But upon seeing those beer cans and the breakfast shop downstairs, she still couldn’t help but leave Yu Qinjiu this message:

“Alcohol is harmful to the body. Don’t drink too much.

The wontons from the shop downstairs are pretty good. So are the soup dumplings.”

~ ~ ~

Busy until the afternoon, Ji Qingyou came out after finishing a surgery. The muscle soreness from the long operation, combined with the dull ache from the injury on her leg, made her steps look a bit unsteady, and her neck was also sore.

She hadn’t walked far before Ji Xiruan also emerged from the operating room, looking tired. She draped her arm over Ji Qingyou’s shoulder, slightly lowered her head, and let out a long breath. “Little Jiu’s surgery was very successful. We basically removed all the tumor tissue with adhesions. If her post-op recovery goes well, she should be fine.”

Ji Qingyou took off her mask, revealing her dry lips. “Good work.”

“No problem. But there was bleeding once in the middle; it scared the hell out of me. Luckily, the bleeding stopped smoothly in the end.” Ji Xiruan grinned, pulled off her head covering, and looked out the operating room door.

The lead surgeon was talking to the family about the surgery, reminding them of things to watch out for during the hospital stay. The family member had unbound hair and dry, peeling lips, wiping her tears and clasping the lead surgeon’s hand, overwhelmed with gratitude.

One side was noisy and lively, the other quiet and empty.

“I wonder when I’ll get to be the lead surgeon.” Ji Xiruan suddenly blurted out.

Ji Qingyou glanced at her, pulled her hand off her own shoulder, and continued walking towards the ward. Rubbing her own shoulder, she said, “There’ll be a chance.”

Ji Xiruan caught up. “I know. I’m just a bit scared. And thinking that one day I’ll be the lead surgeon makes me feel sorry for my first patient…”

Her tone was a bit dejected, but soon, she pulled herself together and patted Ji Qingyou’s shoulder. “What about you? You shouldn’t be scared, right? You’ve been in so many surgeries without making mistakes. I haven’t heard a single professor say anything bad about you. They all praise you…”

They had reached the office door. Ji Qingyou didn’t answer the question about being “scared.” She walked into the office, put the watch she had taken off back on her wrist, sat down at her desk, and started organizing the surgical record.

Ji Xiruan was also organizing her surgical record, chatting with other doctors in the office about “first time as lead surgeon.” Someone dramatically said they almost threw their scalpel from shaking. Another said they cried through the whole thing, and the attending physician had to step in to take over.

Ji Qingyou listened quietly, not joining the conversation.

An attending physician half-jokingly mentioned her name. “Hey, being nervous for your first time as lead surgeon is normal. It’s human nature. But believe me, when Dr. Ji does her first one, she’ll definitely perform better than all of you!”

“Which Dr. Ji?” someone asked.

Ji Xiruan pursed her lips. “Ji Qingyou, of course. You think it’s me?”

The doctor who asked grinned. “Hey, you never know!”

“But I still believe in Dr. Ji. She’s our general surgery robot. What difficulty can’t she overcome? I bet she won’t even blink during her first time.”

The doctor who said this came up to her, glanced at the surgical record she was writing, and asked, “Isn’t that right, Dr. Ji?”

Ji Qingyou didn’t look up, but still responded politely, “It’s still early for that.”