Chapter 54

It was inevitable for people who had stayed in a mental hospital long-term to start being unable to distinguish between reality and their imagination. Even if the doctor had told me many times that I had basically recovered and would not experience hallucinations, I did not believe it.

If you yourself deny that you have recovered and become a normal person, no matter how much others try to help you, it will be useless.

So when Yan Yang's voice entered my ear, and his faint fragrance wafted by my nose, I still thought he wasn't real. It was only because I missed him too much that I was ‘seeing’ him.

A mentally ill person would be crazy all their life. I didn't believe that I could recover.

And compared to this, my belief that Yan Yang would not come to see me was even stronger.

We squatted there together. I hugged the box of chess pieces to my chest, my eyes glued to his hand.

The real Yan Yang had already ‘taken off’ our ring, so this one was fake.

I got up. Without speaking to him, I placed the chess pieces back on the rack and put the cover back on.

“The hospital called me and advised me to pick you up from the hospital.” He stood behind me, a step's distance away. Because he had squatted down just now, I had left a dirty shoe print on the hem of his black coat.

“Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve. I’m picking you up to celebrate the New Year.”

Chinese New Year’s Eve.

It was on Chinese New Year’s Eve that my world began to split apart. If this really was Yan Yang, there was no way he would be willing to celebrate this festival.

I turned off the light and walked past him without saying a word, lying back down on that single bed of mine. I covered myself with the blanket and looked out the window.

There were many red lanterns hung in the courtyard. However, hanging red lanterns in a place like this couldn't make people feel the joy of the festival; rather, it felt like a summoning of the dead.

There were too many wandering souls here, unable to find their resting place. They bumped into each other like headless flies, panicked and pitiful.

Yan Yang walked to my bedside, blocking my view of the window.

“I don't know why you're not willing to see me,” he said, “All of a sudden, we've become enemies.”

I finally looked at him. With his back against the moonlight, Yan Yang looked like an eerie human skeleton. It made him look like he had come here to take my life.

I was actually quite willing to hand my life over to him. After all, the way I was living now was neither like a human nor like a ghost. It would be better for my life to end in his hands, and we would moreover be most deeply entangled with each other in this lifetime.

“You asked me a question before,” Yan Yang looked down as he spoke to me, the tone of his voice so cold that it could almost cover this New Year's Eve night with a blanket of snow, “You asked me why I had fallen in love with you.”

I remembered; I had indeed asked him this before.

At the time, we had been living in Boston. It had been his birthday that day. He had turned down all of his friend's invitations to celebrate his birthday, while I also pushed away all of my work dinners to hurry back home early to be with him.

That day, Yan Yang's birthday wish had been that we would be together for the rest of our lives. It would be best if it was as lovers, but if that really wasn't possible, then he could still begrudgingly accept it if it was as the most intimate family.

After he had blown out the candles, I asked him that question.

At the time, his answer had been, “I don't know. Maybe because a similar blood flows inside our bodies.”

In the past, we had always thought that our blood relation was both a mark of our unusual love affair, as well as a rope that bound us. It gave us a thrill, yet also always struck at the best time, winding around us until we could barely breathe.

When he asked me this question again, my mind was filled with the image of how Yan Yang had answered the question back then.

It would be best if it was as lovers, but if that really wasn't possible, then as the most intimate family.

But now, what were we?

Like he said, I was the person he resented.

I turned over, unwilling to continue facing this hallucination.

“I don't know if you can still remember what my answer was back then,” Yan Yang said, “But now, I think I fell in love with you to kill myself.”

My back to him, my brows furrowed.

“Because I should never have existed in the first place.” He stayed silent for a long while, so long that I didn't know if he had disappeared already.

I didn't dare to turn back and look. I was afraid I would find that he was still there, and I was also afraid that I would find he wasn't there anymore.

“Yan Yang,” he suddenly spoke, uttering his own name.

“I only found out recently. My existence is actually something that hurts you.” His voice sounded like it had drifted here from far away. Because it had travelled too far a distance, when it arrived at my ear, only a soft whisper was left. I needed a lot of effort to hold onto it, then decipher what he had said. “My appearance once erased your existence, so fate made me fall in love with you, to let you kill me by your own hand.”

I curled up into myself under the blankets, pulling the pillow over to smother my head.

“But it's a good thing. Such a mess must eventually be cleaned up one day. As long as there are still unresolved knots in the heart, there will always be someone who has to live in Hell.”

The pillow was taken away by someone. When I turned over, Yan Yang was leaning down, watching me. He spoke, enunciating every word clearly, “I've changed my name, and moved out of there too. I've spent two years making myself not look like Yan Yang anymore. How about you?”

He leant over, his lips right next to my ear, “Who are you? Yin Ming? Yan Xuan? Or…Yan Yang?”

He asked me, “Which one do you want to be? Do you need me to help you?”