Chapter 33
Twenty-five years.
Enough time for a newborn baby to grow into a capable adult. Enough time for a city to change its skyline several times over. Enough time for memories to fade, for wounds to heal, and for the living to learn to reconcile with the past.
But for Lü Xiaoyan, time seemed to have completely stopped in the summer when he was twenty-eight. The years that followed were nothing more than an endless loop of the same sorrow.
He became a legendary yet reclusive name in the photography world. His output dwindled, but each piece was incredibly valuable. People said his later works possessed a kind of "divinity," ethereal and serene, as if he were photographing landscapes from another dimension. Only he knew that it wasn't divinity, but rather a profound echo left behind after being utterly emptied out.
He still lived in that house far from his hometown, and the darkroom of his studio remained his favorite place. Only now, the mountain of photos of her was gone. In the autumn of his tenth year, he burned them all. Watching the flames devour the images he had painstakingly collected and organized over the years, he felt not relief, but a deeper emptiness—a void that came from losing even the things he had to remember.
From then on, his annual ritual was simplified to a single thing: on August 31st, he would enter the darkroom, use that rare camera (which he never used to photograph anything else), load a blank sheet of film, point it at an empty wall, and press the shutter. Then, under a red safety light, he would develop the destined-to-be-blank negative.
You get a completely black negative, or one that occasionally has strange stripes due to light leaks.
He arranged these negatives by year and stored them in a sandalwood box. They were his love letters to the years, and also his declaration of war against death. Year after year, they silently proved that he was still waiting, still remembering.
He is fifty-three years old this year.
His temples were streaked with gray, and his eyes were calmer than in his youth, yet also more vacant. The autumn wind blew again, carrying the familiar scent of dryness tinged with decay. He entered the darkroom as planned.
The process was ingrained in his very being. He retrieved the film, prepared the chemicals, and set the timer. A dark red halo enveloped him, giving his white hair an eerie warm hue, yet it couldn't dispel the chill emanating from him.
He placed the film into the developing tank and gently shook it. The timer ticked rhythmically in the silence, like a heartbeat or a countdown.
He leaned against the cold workbench and closed his eyes. Twenty-five years had passed; the vivid pain had long since dulled into a dull ache, but each ritual still tugged at those deeply buried nerves. Her smile, her voice, her last blood-stained letter… remained as clear as yesterday.
"bite--"
The timer went off.
He opened his eyes and skillfully proceeded with the fixing and developing. Then, he picked up the wet negative, held it up to the red light, and prepared to examine, as he had done in previous years, that darkness that symbolized the emptiness within his heart.
However--
The instant the red light pierced through the film emulsion layer, Lü Xiaoyan's breathing, along with the workings of his entire world, suddenly stopped.
The film was no longer the expected all-black or jumbled stripes.
Against that familiar, dark background that symbolizes nothingness, near the edge, a clear, smiling human figure is prominently displayed.
It is Qiu Yayu.
It wasn't a copy of any photo in his album. It was her, yet it didn't seem like her. The image carried the soft grain of an old photograph, yet it was incredibly real. She was wearing the white dress she wore when they first met, her head slightly tilted, her smile clean and bright, carrying a subtle, girlish mischievousness and gentleness. Her gaze seemed to pierce through the film, through the dust of twenty-five years, looking directly and clearly at him.
The background is blurred, but you can vaguely make out the outline of a sycamore tree with falling leaves.
Just like... just like that autumn when they first met, the moment he caught a falling leaf through the viewfinder. Except, in this photo, she's not catching a leaf, but gently waving to the camera, to him.
It's like saying goodbye.
It's like... saying "I'm back".
The tweezers in Lü Xiaoyan's hand fell to the workbench with a "clatter," making a jarring sound in the silent darkroom.
He stared intently at the negative, his pupils contracting to their limit. It felt as if all the blood in his body rushed to his head, only to freeze instantly. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think; the whole world spun wildly before his eyes, shattering and then reforming.
That's impossible!
Is it a hallucination? Is it hysteria caused by years of excessive longing? Or... a technical error in the darkroom? An incorrect chemical mix? An abnormal exposure of the film?
He abruptly reached out and almost violently turned off the red light, then switched on the glaring incandescent bulb.
He trembled as he held the negative up to his eyes again, facing the bright light.
The images are still there.
Qiu Yayu's smile was clear and steady, carrying a supernatural peace and warmth. The way she waved was so natural, as if she were standing on the other side of time, finally moved by his long wait, and returned his gaze.
Twenty-five years.
He developed twenty-four blank negatives, representing loss and despair.
In the twenty-fifth year, he obtained a negative... with her on it.
What's this?
Is it a mercy from fate? Or an even crueler joke?
Was it her response to him from another world? Or was it the final proof that he had gone mad?
Lu Xiaoyan staggered back a step, his back against the cold wall, and slowly slid to the ground. He clutched the wet, yet seemingly warm, film negative tightly, as if it were the only piece of driftwood a drowning person could hold onto.
He looked at the smile on the film, which, though twenty-five years had passed, remained vivid and seemed to have never left.
An immense, indescribable grief, like a flood that had been building up for twenty-five years, finally broke through all the dams and surged forth. At the same time, an absurd sense of relief, almost tearing him apart, and immense confusion also intertwined and swept over him.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Only scalding tears, like beads from a broken string, surged forth unexpectedly and violently, flowing freely down his face marked by the passage of time. For the first time in twenty-five years.
He cried.
Silent, yet more sorrowful and complex than any loud wailing.
Outside the darkroom, the autumn wind blew through the studio windowpanes, making a whistling sound, like a sigh, or a gentle response from some distant time and space.
Lu Xiaoyan sat on the cold ground, clutching the impossible negative tightly, sobbing uncontrollably.
Goodbye, autumn wind.
Goodbye, twenty-five years of waiting.
Goodbye... my eternal autumn.
The negative lay quietly in his palm.
Like a mystery.
A miracle.
A beginning, or... the final ending.
Okay, this is the final epilogue following the ending of Chapter Thirty-Three.
---
Lü Xiaoyan sat in that dark room for the entire night.
As the morning light streamed through the high window, he remained in the same position—back against the wall, palm to palm the negative that defied all laws of physics and the logic of time. The developer solution seeped into the floor, leaving dark marks, like a door to another world.
He took the negative to the top film chemistry laboratory in the country. The expert in the white coat repeatedly tested it in the instrument room, and finally took off his glasses and shook his head at him: "Mr. Lü, there are no traces of post-processing in the emulsion layer, and the imaging conforms to the optical principles. But according to carbon isotope determination..." The expert paused, as if organizing his words in a way that would not contradict science, "This is indeed the same batch of film from twenty-five years ago."
There was no answer. Science remained silent before him.
He didn't enlarge the negative into a photograph. Some miracles, perhaps, should only exist behind the hazy emulsion layer, in the liminal space between the red light of the darkroom and the developing solution. Just like her, forever frozen in the moment before autumn arrives.
He began to travel with that rare, discontinued camera. He no longer shot blank film, nor did he deliberately chase after her phantom. He walked past the beach they had promised to visit, the salty sea breeze carrying the scent she had imagined; he stood in the poplar forest of the Northwest, the golden fallen leaves like the countless autumns she had missed.
On an ordinary afternoon, he passed by an old-fashioned roasted chestnut shop, the sweet aroma carried on the autumn breeze. He instinctively raised his camera and, for the first time, pressed the shutter to capture the world.
In the viewfinder, an old man selling chestnuts smiles as he hands a paper bag to a little girl; the setting sun casts long shadows of them.
At that moment, Lü Xiaoyan suddenly understood.
She never left. She lives in the curves of the ginkgo leaves, in the smell of chemicals in the darkroom, and in the eyes that still tremble with beauty every time he raises his camera.
Death is not the end; forgetting is.
On August 31st of this year, he entered the darkroom as usual. The procedure was the same, except that when the red light came on, he whispered to the blank photographic paper:
Happy birthday, Ya-yu.
The photographic paper remained pure white in the developing solution, but he seemed to see—
Those blank spaces represent the words she didn't finish saying.
The fixer solution contains the starlight of twenty-five years.
And what flows in the washing tank is their eternal autumn.
Okay, this is the final chapter, bringing this story to a close.
---
end
After the discovery of the twenty-fifth negative, Lü Xiaoyan's life did not undergo a dramatic change. He did not seek explanations for the paranormal events, nor did he attempt to "communicate" with another world. He simply carefully framed the negative and hung it on the quietest wall in his studio, alongside the rare camera.
He remained silent, appearing even more somber than usual as autumn arrived. But he no longer developed blank photographs each year. That almost self-torturing ritual, which had lasted for twenty-four years, quietly ended in the twenty-fifth year due to an inexplicable "miracle."
He picked up his camera again, not the rare, discontinued model, but his usual work equipment. He photographed the rising steam at the morning market, the transparent laughter of children chasing bubbles, and the precise balance of the first winter snowflake landing on a bare branch. In his work, the heavy, almost inhalable sadness gradually faded, replaced by a profound, weathered tranquility, and an almost reverent gaze at the subtle beauty of life itself.
Critics were once again astonished by his stylistic shift, calling it a "late-stage clarity." Only he himself knew that this was not a change in style, but rather a difficult reconciliation with the past, with his obsessions, and with himself.
He hadn't forgotten her. How could he? She was the most vibrant and memorable part of his youth, the catalyst for all his understanding of "love" and "beauty." He had simply learned to place her in the deepest, softest, and most precious corner of his memory, rather than letting her become a cold, oppressive monument that crushed his entire life.
He would occasionally visit Qiu Yayu's parents. The two elderly people, their hair long since white, lived in a quiet retirement community on the outskirts of the city. When they saw Lü Xiaoyan, their eyes would still well up with tears, but they could also calmly talk about Yayu's childhood anecdotes and what she should look like now. Time hasn't healed everything, but it has taught the living how to breathe even with scars.
On a crisp autumn day, Lü Xiaoyan took a bunch of her favorite white daisies to the cemetery.
For the first time in twenty-five years, he truly had the courage to stand here alone.
The photo on the tombstone showed a young man with a clean smile and bright eyes, a stark contrast to the somber atmosphere of the surrounding pines and cypresses. He knelt down, gently placed daisies in front of the grave, and reached out, just as he had done years ago, to brush away the fine dust from the photo with his fingertips.
"I'm here," he said softly, his voice calm, with a hint of barely perceptible tenderness.
There were no tears or heart-wrenching questions. Only a long, peaceful silence. The autumn wind swept through the cemetery, ruffling his graying hair and the delicate petals of the daisies, as if in silent response.
“I think I… understand what you meant in your letter.” He looked at her in the photo and said slowly, “‘Always be that boy who loves light and shadow’… I didn’t understand before. I thought that preserving all the light and shadow of you was love. Now I know that true love is to use what you taught me to see more light.”
He paused, as if listening to the sound of the wind.
"I received the negative. Whatever it is... thank you."
Goodbye, Ya-yu.
"My...Autumn".
He stood up, took one last deep look at that eternally eighteen-year-old smiling face, then turned around and, step by step, steadily left the cemetery along the path he had come from.
Sunlight filtered through the sparse clouds, casting warm dappled patterns that stretched his shadow long. His silhouette was no longer that of the thin, grief-stricken boy he once was, nor the lonely soul imprisoned by obsessions in the years that followed; but a complete "person" who carried the weight of the past yet still chose to move forward.
He walked out of the cemetery, out of the barrier called "Autumn" that had trapped him for twenty-five years.
The sky was high and blue, a clear and bright blue unique to autumn.
The wind continued to blow, carrying a complex mix of harvest and decay, towards the unknown distance.
Lü Xiaoyan raised her head, squinted, and felt the warmth of the sunlight on her face.
He knew that every autumn to come, he would still think of her.
But that longing will no longer be a piercing blade, but will transform into a tender memory ingrained in our very bones.
Goodbye, autumn.
And you will live on forever in every place where there is light.
---
(Goodbye, Autumn - The End)
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