Paths. Prologue

“They told me that this road would lead me to the ocean of death, and I turned back halfway. And ever since, crooked, blind, winding paths have stretched out before me…”
— Yosano Akiko

Years later, on a shopping center parking lot scorching under the midday sun, where the smells of asphalt and exhaust fumes mingled into the thick, stagnant air, Xia Desheng saw her and realized that time is not a river, but a closed circle, and that some meetings are predestined not to start something new, but to remind us of what never managed to end.

She stood by the rear door of a small white van marked “Yi Pin Guo,” trying to lift a heavy cardboard box. The box would not yield, slipping from her hands, and in this simple, clumsy movement lay so much bone-deep weariness that Desheng felt an almost physical pain. Tan Xiangliu. She had hardly changed: the same slender line of the neck, the same dark hair gathered in a careless knot from which an unruly strand had escaped and stuck to her damp temple. She brushed it away with the back of her hand — a sharp, practiced gesture that held nothing of the schoolgirl who used to laugh with her head thrown back, but only endless, mundane labor.

He could have walked over. He could have helped with the box, called out her name, smiled casually, asked how things were. But his feet seemed rooted to the asphalt. Because in that very second, when she frowned and gripped the box again, time cracked for him and flowed backward, dragging him into that day, many years ago, when the three of them — he, she, and Wu Wenbo — were still inseparable, like three threads woven into a single knot. That day which was supposed to be just a day, but became the beginning of the end of their shared story. They did not yet know then that their every step only entangled the paths of their own destiny, that every truth found would poison them like a slow venom, and that the knot of their friendship had already begun to unravel, dooming them to the very loneliness they were so desperately trying to escape.

He watched as Xiangliu, finally managing the box, slammed the van door shut with effort and, leaning her back against it, closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to catch a second of silence in this roaring world. And in this fleeting peace of hers, in her slumped shoulders and slightly parted lips, Desheng saw not just fatigue, but the echo of that old story, the shadow of the road from which they had all turned away, each choosing their own path.

To approach her now would mean colliding with what he feared most: with the question to which he still had no answer. With the past that continued to live inside him like a shard. He was afraid — not of her, not of her tired gaze, but that he would see in that gaze the reflection of his own fear and his own defeat. She seemed completely alien to Desheng — and at the same time painfully familiar, like a forgotten melody heard in a dream.

She did not notice him. She got into the car and drove away, dissolving into the shimmering haze of the Beijing afternoon. And he remained standing in the parking lot, realizing that all of this had already happened — this meeting, and this flight, and this bitterness — and all of this would inevitably repeat again, because in some stories the finale is written at the very beginning, and the heroes are doomed to eternally return to the point where their roads parted forever.

Chapter One →
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