The time off form approved by my supervisor was tucked into the top layer of my bag, the edges of the beige office paper curled up from my fingertips.
The ink on the two characters for "leave of absence" blurred slightly, like the fog that's currently clouding my mind.
They said they'd give me a break to get back into shape, but nobody knows. I just wanted to ask someone.
This heart, which has witnessed countless lives and deaths on the dissection table, must have long since hardened into iron.
On the day Qianluo closed her eyes, he secretly built a wall to keep all memories of her out.
The sofas in the mental health clinic were so soft they made me uneasy; when I sank into them, I couldn't find any support for my back.
The doctor, wearing a light blue shirt, pushed over a glass of hot water. Water droplets quickly condensed on the glass, sliding down the side of the glass onto the coffee table, leaving a small ring of watermarks.
I stared at my blurry reflection in the glass, my Adam's apple bobbing three times before I finally poured out the panic that I had been hiding for more than half a year.
"I can hardly remember what she looks like anymore."
A few days ago, I found a gray scarf that she had only half-knitted, with crooked and uneven stitches.
But I thought about it all night, and I still couldn't recall if her eyelashes brushed against the back of her hand when she bent down to wind the yarn.
The doctor scribbled on the brown-covered notebook, the sound of the pen nib scraping across the pages particularly jarring in the quiet consultation room.
When she looked up, her eyes behind her glasses were as gentle as the afternoon sun in spring, yet they couldn't penetrate the fog in my heart.
"Ms. Mo, your psychological test results are very stable, even more resilient than the average person."
Selective amnesia after trauma is indeed common, but your condition is more like the natural erosion of time.
Just like the slogans on the old wall, it's not that someone deliberately wipes them off; it's just that the words will gradually fade away after being exposed to the wind and sun for a long time.
This isn't your fault; don't be so hard on yourself.
"Natural polishing?" I repeated softly, my fingertips unconsciously tracing the water droplets on the glass, the cool sensation seeping into my heart through my fingers.
It turns out that even the excuse of "trauma" is not something I can use.
Without any stress disorder or subconscious avoidance, I wasn't "forced to forget," but simply, little by little, pushed Qianluo away from my memory.
Just like that cloth rabbit I lost when I was a child. I was holding it in my arms before going to sleep, but when I woke up the next day, I couldn't even remember if there was a red button sewn on its ear.
As I left the clinic, the midday sun was so bright it was hard to open my eyes. I raised my hand to shield my forehead, and the light filtering through my fingers stung my eyes.
My feet seemed to be pulled by a string; instead of heading home, I turned onto a bus heading to the suburbs.
During the forty-minute journey, I stared at the street scenes flashing past the window, but I couldn't absorb anything—the doctor's words kept replaying in my mind, and I kept thinking about Qianluo.
The more I thought about it, the more blurred her face became, leaving only a rough outline, like an unfinished sketch.
The iron gate of the martyrs' cemetery was rusty. Old Zhang, the gatekeeper, was sitting in the gatehouse knitting. When he saw me, he looked up and smiled: "Not wearing your white coat today?"
I nodded without saying anything.
For the past six months or so, I've always come during my days off. Sometimes I wear a white coat, sometimes I wear casual clothes. He never asks many questions, but he always puts a bottle of hot water in my hand before I leave.
He didn't add water today, but just pointed to the west: "I just watered the flowers, and the grass in front of your comrade's monument has grown a bit more."
The word "comrade-in-arms" brought tears to my eyes.
Qianluo's tombstone is in the most secluded corner of the cemetery, hidden behind two rows of tall pine trees and surrounded by waist-high grass.
There were no black-and-white photographs, no lengthy biography, only a gray stone tablet with a small bronze police badge embedded at the top, gleaming coldly in the sunlight.
She was an undercover agent, codenamed "Qingque," and from the age of twenty-three, when she entered that gray area, she hid the name "Qianluo" in the shadows.
Even when she sacrificed her life, the case file only stated "code name Qingque, died in the line of duty," and even her real name remained a secret.
I crouched down and pulled up a few overgrown foxtail grasses in front of the tombstone, my fingertips accidentally touching the police badge.
The raised texture hurt my fingertips, just like the feeling on that rainy night three years ago.
That day, I had just finished an autopsy and hadn't even had time to change out of my white coat when I rushed off to report to my superiors, who then received a call from the anti-drug squad.
When we stormed into the drug den, Qianluo was lying on the cold ground with a deep, bone-revealing wound on her brow bone. It probably wasn't just her brow bone, because I only saw her head.
The blood had congealed into a dark brown color, stained with some dirt and grass clippings.
Wearing sterile gloves, I gently smoothed the scars on her brow bone and traced the curve of her nose.
It seemed as if her skin still had warmth then, and her eyelashes still held lingering raindrops, but now, all her fingertips touched was the bone-chilling cold of the stone tablet.
Tears fell unexpectedly, landing on the freshly pulled weeds and leaving small damp marks.
But what surged in my heart was not the heart-wrenching pain I felt when I first lost her.
It was pain, yet it was shrouded in an unfamiliar solemnity—like seeing a narcotics officer fall to the guns of a drug dealer in the news.
Like reading the story of a hero's eternal rest in a memorial hall, the pain is mixed with respect and regret, but it lacks the kind of unwavering devotion that a "lover" should have.
I'm not even sure if the tears I'm shedding now are for losing her, or for feeling guilty that I can't remember what she looks like.
The afterglow on the horizon gradually faded, from its initial crimson to pale pink, and finally only a touch of orange-red remained, painting the sky into a casual painting.
The wind blew through the pine forest, carrying the bitter scent of grass and earth, and made the hem of my clothes sway gently.
I stood there for a long time, until my legs went numb, until the twilight crept up to my ankles, as if trying to trap me in this silence.
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