For a long time, I've been thinking about you.

"Okay, I won't turn on the light." I withdrew my hand from the switch, seeing her still stubbornly keeping her eyes closed, her thin, frail shoulders trembling. "Gu Wanlin, can I hug you?"

She nodded with her eyes closed. Her back was so thin that even a single hospital bed left plenty of room behind her.

I carefully arranged the tubes on her body, took off my coat, and lay down on my side on the bed. I hugged her from behind, gently patting her waist with my hand. She always liked me to hold her like this when we slept.

After many years, I lay down next to her in a familiar position again. The air conditioner blades creaked and swayed in the room, and the warm air, carrying her familiar scent, wafted onto my face, making me almost fall into a daze.

Gu Wanlin seemed surprised that I would hug her and then climb into her bed. She trembled slightly when my body touched the back of her neck, but then silently gave in. Her hands groped down her body for a moment and found my hand on her waist.

Her hands were weak, and she could only loosely grasp mine, guiding me up to her shoulder on the side of the mattress. "Aqing, I can't feel anything down there..."

It was my fault. Lying next to her, I was so busy reminiscing about the past that I felt good and completely forgot about all of this.

I continued to gently pat her shoulders to comfort her, but found she was still trembling violently. I had just checked her forehead; although it was a little feverish, it shouldn't be enough to make her feel this bad. I immediately became worried. "Is there anything else that's bothering you?"

She spoke, her voice strained, "My legs hurt."

I thought she was referring to neuralgia. Sister Zhang told me that although Gu Wanlin's injury was complete, she experienced frequent neuralgia attacks, often with intense burning and stabbing sensations. Besides taking painkillers, applying heat or cold compresses to the painful areas provided significant relief.

"I'll wring out a towel to give you a hot compress." She said, getting up to get out of bed.

She stopped me, saying it wasn't necessary, and gave a bitter smile, "It won't work, I mean the leg that's gone. I just took painkillers, they'll take effect in a bit."

I picked up my phone to check the weather, and sure enough, there was going to be sleet tomorrow. The phantom limb pain struck her more accurately than the weather forecast.

Remembering the massage techniques Sister Zhou had taught me to relieve her pain, I hesitated before touching her right leg. Her right leg stump was swollen that day not only from a severe strain but also from several cuts she'd sustained when falling from her wheelchair; it shouldn't be touched for the time being.

Beneath the thin hospital gown, all I could feel were rough, uneven elastic bandages. She used to sleep curled up like a baby on her side, and I could wrap my arms around her from behind, following the curves of her body all the way down to her slender calves. But now I could only touch a short, small section; my palm could almost envelop the entire cross-section of her severed end, and below that was utter emptiness, her trouser legs hanging loosely on the bed in front of her.

She was in so much pain, and I couldn't do anything to ease her suffering. I gently stroked the broken piece of skin, my heart aching with pain.

She noticed the glow emanating from my phone screen and knew I was checking the weather. She asked me, "Is it going to rain or snow?"

"Sleet".

She smiled bitterly again, "Aqing, I've told you before about the origin of my name. I was born in late autumn. My mother suffered in the delivery room all day, and I was finally born when it suddenly started raining at night. My parents thought that the delivery process was so difficult, why did I come out so easily when it rained? It's like a long drought finally getting rained on, which means that rain is a good omen. So they didn't ask anyone to tell them, and just named me Wanlin (meaning 'late rain')."

"Shouldn't we still do some calculations? How can it be a good omen? I get scared whenever I hear it's going to rain now."

She continued to laugh weakly, “Maybe this name really is bad for me. You know, it was raining the night of the accident. Where I live, it hardly ever rains all year round. The truck that hit me was speeding badly, but there aren’t many cars at night, so driving that speed is fine on a normal day. It was just that the road was flooded because of the rain, and the wheels slipped, causing it to lose control and hit me.”

The first time I heard her talk about the car accident, listening to her story felt like I was back at the scene, vividly recalling that heartbreaking rainy night in a foreign land.

"When I first experienced phantom limb pain, I couldn't understand it at all. At that time, I could only lie in bed, and I couldn't move my arms much. I couldn't feel anything below my collarbone; it was as if my whole body was sealed in cement. The doctor told me as soon as I woke up that my right leg had been amputated. My leg was gone, so how could I be in so much pain?"

"It felt like I was still stuck in a deformed car, my legs were squeezed out of their normal shape, and it hurt like they were being torn apart."

"But I know it's an illusion, just something I imagined. I probably never really felt that kind of pain. The doctor said that my spinal cord was severed by cervical vertebrae the moment the car accident happened, and I was fully conscious until the ambulance arrived. At that time, all I knew was that I couldn't feel my body at all. I couldn't feel my legs even though they were twisted and bleeding. I thought it was because I was about to die. Isn't it said that if a person is seriously injured, their body will secrete a lot of hormones to block out pain before they die?"

"When I thought I was going to die that night, I thought about a lot of things. For a long time, I thought about you."

"Fragments of our time together flashed before my eyes like a dream, all little things: grocery shopping and cooking together, hanging up the laundry in perfect unison after showering every night, running to a bubble tea shop to take shelter from the rain during our walks. What I was most grateful for then was that after the breakup, I mustered up the courage to call you and apologize for my lack of self-reflection and stubbornness. Otherwise, if our last interaction had only been the unbearable pain of the breakup, I don't know how much I would have regretted it."

"I dare not say that I had no regrets about anyone or anything in this world at that time, but I had no regrets about you, and that was one of the greatest comforts to me."

My heart ached terribly, and I held her tightly in my arms.

"But why can't you give me and my parents this chance!" Her sudden, heart-wrenching cry, bursting from deep within her throat, sounded weak and feeble because her lung capacity was far smaller than that of an average person, which only made me feel more sorrowful.

It suddenly dawned on me that her feigned calmness and suppressed trembling during her earlier narration were all part of her quiet restraint in preparation for this uncontrollable outburst.

The pillow was half-soaked by her tears, not because of the pain she had long been accustomed to enduring, but because she was spending this night alone, a night that should have been filled with family reunion.

It seems fate was guiding me; I should have come here tonight. I can't imagine how she would have spent the night if I hadn't been there.

Her chest heaved violently, her breathing was completely out of rhythm, inhaling was almost like gasping, and the air rubbing against her respiratory tract made a piercing sound.

I immediately placed my hand on her chest. "Gu Wanlin, don't rush. Follow my rhythm. Yes, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale... Good job." With my other hand, I grabbed my phone, glanced at it haphazardly, and pressed buttons to call Li You over.

Thankfully, she caught her breath quickly, and I breathed a sigh of relief and put down my phone. I lovingly wiped the thin layer of sweat from her forehead. "Are you tired from talking so much? If you are, let's take a break. Whenever you want to talk again, I'll be here listening."

She took a few breaths and said, "I'm fine. Let me finish."