Blue and purple starlight in the sugar jar
On a rainy afternoon, the stained glass windows of the café filtered the sunlight into shimmering gold. Ayu curled up on the corner sofa, her fingertips tracing the coffee stains and rings on the wooden tabletop—each scratch resembling the ripples of Qinghai Lake, while the seashell fragments embedded in the corner were the same kind she'd picked up last year on Weizhou Island. Reaching for the sugar jar, her sleeve brushed against the thin layer of dust on the jar, revealing the gilded year "2015," like a tooth mark gnawed by time.
"Shouldn't we throw this can of sugar away?" Zhong Hua pushed the cappuccino over, sprinkling cinnamon powder on the milk foam in the shape of the Big Dipper. "Look, the lid is all rusted."
Ayu didn't speak, her fingernails digging into the cracks in the metal jar. The moment the sugar jar cracked open with a "crack," the cloying sweetness of stale sugar mixed with the smell of mold wafted out. A few grains of yellow sugar rolled onto the menu, perfectly covering the picture of the recommended dish for "Fenghuang Ancient Town." As she picked up the sugar grains, she noticed one was split in two, with half a dried petal stuck in the crack—the same color as the rhododendron Zhong Hua had picked up under the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village.
“There’s something in here.” She shook open the sugar jar, and a rolled-up strip of paper fell onto the latte’s foam. Unfolding it, she discovered it was a movie ticket stub. The date, November 5, 2015, had long since faded, and the ink on the theater number “7” had blotted out in teardrop shapes, reminding her of the unfinished peony petals on her mother’s embroidery frame. On the back of the stub, written in pencil, the strokes so light as if afraid to tear the paper, were the words: “Waiting for someone who will never come.”
Zhong Hua's teaspoon suddenly tapped against the rim of his cup. He stared at the line of writing, his Adam's apple bobbing twice: "This handwriting..."
The café suddenly darkened, and a downpour pounded on the stained glass, shimmering the sunlight into fragments of blue-purple. Ayu followed his gaze and saw the pencil marks on the back of the ticket stub emerge in the rain—the pause at the turn of the stroke was exactly the same as the ending stroke of the character "辛" on Zhong Hua's grandfather's account book, while the vertical hook of the character "等" had a small notch at the tip, much like the fragments of flying apsaras ribbons they had seen in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang.
“That year in Fenghuang Ancient Town,” Zhong Hua’s voice was hoarse as he reached for the ticket stub, his sleeve brushing aside a candy jar, “on a night of torrential rain, I found a postcard at the guesthouse…”
Sugar granules rolled all over the table, one of which fell into the folds of Ayu's scarf. As she touched the edge of the sugar granule, she suddenly remembered her mother's last words: "When your father was young, he always drew on the back of the candy wrappers, saying he wanted to embed all the stars of Dunhuang into the candy." Zhong Hua had already taken out his phone from his wallet, opened the photo album and found an old photo—a rainy night in Fenghuang in 2013, a wet postcard on the wooden windowsill, with the same pencil writing on the back: "When the rain stops, the boat will set sail," and the water stains on the edge of the postcard, the blurred shape, completely overlapped with the movie ticket stub in front of her.
The downpour suddenly stopped. Water droplets on the stained glass refracted light, and when they fell onto the sugar jar, the entire jar of brown sugar suddenly glowed with a bluish-purple light. Ayu held her breath, seeing the dust floating between the sugar grains coalesce into star trails—Betelgeuse's position was exactly the coordinates of Zhong Hua's birth city, and the Milky Way's trajectory overlapped with their road trip along the Yunnan-Tibet Highway. Zhong Hua's fingers passed through the light spots, and the sugar grains his fingertips brushed against suddenly lit up, much like the Southern Cross reflected in Milk Lake in Daocheng Yading that year.
“Look at this.” Ayu picked up a diamond-shaped sugar granule and held it up to the light, revealing air bubbles inside. The shape of the bubbles stunned her—it was a three-dimensional model of the Weizhou Island volcano, and the patterns on the bubble walls were exactly the same as the peony scrolls her mother had embroidered on the tablecloth. Zhong Hua took the sugar granule and noticed that the angles of the diamond-shaped edges were exactly the same as the cracks in the ice of Namtso Lake, and the sugar crystals on the edge of the granule were melting slowly at the speed of the water flow from the Yubeng Village Waterfall.
The old clock in the café struck three. The last ray of sunlight pierced through the iris pattern on the stained glass, casting a complete patch of light on the sugar jar. Ayu suddenly realized that all the light spots refracted by the sugar granules, when connected, formed the loop they had drawn in their notebooks during their trip—the orange glow of the sunrise over Qinghai Lake, the golden light of the camel bells in Dunhuang, the blue-purple of the starry sky in Daocheng, all flowing within this jar of 2015 brown sugar. The pencil writing on the back of the ticket stub gradually faded in the light, until only the hook of the character "等" remained, embedded with tiny blue-purple sugar crystals, much like the brightest North Star in the star trail photo Zhong Hua took for her at Namtso Lake.
“My dad used to say,” Ayu’s fingertips traced the year on the sugar jar, “that sugar is the scar formed by time.” She suddenly remembered her mother’s camphor wood chest, where a jar of sugar was hidden in a secret compartment at the bottom, but it had never been opened since her mother passed away. Zhong Hua placed the sugar granules in her palm; the metallic coolness spread beneath her skin, and the blue-purple starlight inside the sugar granules flickered with her heartbeat—the frequency resonated with the camel bells they heard in Dunhuang, harmonized with the roar of the Yubeng icefall, and perfectly matched the angular velocity of the rotating starry sky of Namtso.
As the waiter came to clear the table, Ayu suddenly stuffed the sugar jar into her bag. The moment she stepped out of the cafe, the downpour began again. She and Zhonghua huddled under an umbrella and saw the reflection of the sugar jar developing in the shop window across the street: a 2015 movie ticket stub, a postcard from Fenghuang Ancient Town, and the peony embroidered by her mother—all melted into liquid in the blue-purple rain. As it flowed down the glass, it drew the Yunnan-Tibet route they had never completed, and the end of the route was a "wait" written in sugar icing, with a sugar crystal in the shape of the Weizhou Island volcano embedded in its center.
Back home, Ayu's hands were still trembling as she rummaged through her mother's camphor wood chest. The sugar jar in the hidden compartment at the bottom was exactly the same as the one in the coffee shop. When she pried it open, a candy wrapper fell out, with the same pencil writing on the back: "The ship has sailed, I'm still waiting." Zhonghua folded the two wrappers together and held them up to the light. The overlapping strokes glowed, forming a pattern that made both of them hold their breath—the outline of Bird Island on Qinghai Lake. And the point of light in the center of Bird Island was shimmering with the same blue-purple hue as the starry sky of Daocheng, at the tidal frequency recorded in Zhonghua's grandfather's logbook.
The rain was still falling outside the window, and dappled sunlight filtered through the stained glass and fell onto the candy jar. Ayu suddenly remembered her mother saying that her first date with her father was at the movie theater, and she had collected a whole box of candy wrappers from that day. Zhong Hua's fingers traced the rust on the candy jar; the peeling metal revealed the red undercoat beneath. That color instantly reminded him of the lanterns he had seen in the rainy night in Fenghuang Ancient Town—the postcards hanging from the lantern tassels were exactly the same as the one they had found today—the handwriting, the water stains, even the rough edges were identical.
The blue-purple starlight in the sugar jar grew brighter and brighter in the twilight, each sugar granule like a miniature universe locked within. Ayu placed the sugar jar from the café next to her mother's, and discovered that the rust patterns on their surfaces could be pieced together to form a complete circle—resembling the surface of Lake Namtso. The sugar crystals in the center of the lake were resonating and connecting to form lines, the trajectory of which was the arc left in the clouds by migratory birds flying over Qinghai Lake on the day she met Zhong Hua.
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