“The water flow speed of the Divine Waterfall…” Zhong Hua murmured, his eyes fixed on the ripples, “about 1.2 meters per second, just like this.”
How could he remember so clearly? Ayu wondered. They were under the waterfall, raincoats on their backs, the icy mist hitting their faces. At the time, she was only focused on marveling at the waterfall's magnificence, while Zhong Hua squatted by the pool, using his phone's stopwatch to measure the water flow for ages. Now, those details she had mocked as "useless" were now vividly resurrected on the tiles of this waiting room.
The ripples gradually disappeared, leaving a ring of watermarks on the tile surface, making the patterns of limescale and rust even clearer. Ayu suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu—not at Namtso Lake, nor in Yubeng Village, but in a more distant dream. In that dream, she too had squatted before such tiles, watching the watermarks slowly dry, while the patterns on the wall seemed to come alive, writhing and eventually transforming into a true galaxy, stretching from the wall to the ceiling, then cascading down, enveloping her and Zhong Hua within it.
"Why is this happening?" she asked softly, as if she were asking Zhong Hua, or perhaps the wall covered in limescale.
Zhong Hua did not answer. He reached out and gently touched the watermark left by the droplet with his index finger, his fingertip tracing the center of the Milky Way. The sunlight shone perfectly on his hand, making the lines of his knuckles overlap with the water stains on the tiles, as if another star map was hidden in his fingerprints.
"Do you remember?" he suddenly asked, his voice very soft, "the wish we made that day at Namtso Lake."
Ayu remembered, of course. That day they lay by the lake, watching the Milky Way flow overhead, and Zhonghua said he wanted to make a wish and plant it in a star. She asked him what he wished for, but he just smiled and didn't answer, only saying he would tell her when his wish came true.
“Perhaps…” Zhong Hua’s fingertip paused on the star Dubhe in the constellation Ursa Major, “that’s how wishes are recorded. In the places we’ve been, in the things we’ve touched, time will settle the details and turn them into symbols that only we can understand.”
He stood up, walked to the tap, and turned it on. A few more drops of water fell, landing in different places on the star map. The ripples from each drop had a different rhythm, some fast, some slow, as if playing a symphony of star trails that only they could understand.
“Look at this.” Zhong Hua pointed to the constellation Ursa Minor next to the drain. The ripples from the water droplet had spread there, making the rust color even darker. “The position of Polaris is exactly our home’s current coordinates.”
Ayu looked closer and sure enough, the edge of the water droplet stopped precisely at the position of the rusty North Star. The radius of the water droplet's spread, converted into actual distance, was exactly the same as the distance from their home, covering all the places they had traveled to—Qinghai Lake, Dunhuang, Yubeng Village, Weizhou Island, Namtso Lake... just like a circle drawn with love as its radius.
The construction foreman's shouts came from outside, telling them to pack their things and leave quickly, as the wall was going to be blown up that afternoon. Ayu and Zhonghua exchanged a glance, both seeing reluctance in each other's eyes. This wall, covered in limescale and rust, suddenly transformed into an open time-travel photo album, every line recording their footprints and heartbeats.
“Let’s take a picture of it.” Ayu took out her phone, adjusting the angle to frame the entire star map in the lens. Sunlight, limescale, rust, and those faint ripples combined to create a fantastical scene in the lens, much like the time-lapse photography of the starry sky they took at Namtso Lake.
Zhong Hua also took out his phone, but instead of taking a picture, he turned on the recording function. He placed the phone in the center of the Milky Way, listening to the sound of dripping water from the faucet, the noise of construction outside, and his own and A Yu's breathing. These sounds blended together, and perhaps one day in the future, they would become another star map hidden in the details.
"Let's go," the construction foreman urged again.
Ayu took one last look at the wall. The limescale and rust shimmered warmly in the setting sun. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor gazed at each other across the Milky Way, just like her and Zhong Hua. After traveling to so many places, they would eventually return to each other. She suddenly understood that the scenery she encountered on her travels, the coincidences she found in old objects, were not accidental, but love letters written to them by time, hiding encounters, partings, and reunions in the details, waiting to be discovered and understood one day.
As they stepped out of the waiting room, the setting sun bathed the entire city in an orange-red hue. Zhong Hua led A Yu by the hand, walking across the shattered bricks and broken glass. A Yu glanced back at the restroom window that was about to be blown up; sunlight streamed through the pane, casting a final ray of light on the limescale star map, like a falling meteor, brief yet brilliant.
“Tell me,” she suddenly asked Zhong Hua, “where will the limescale and rust go after the wall is blown up?”
Zhong Hua gripped her hand tightly, his fingertips tracing the lines on her palm, just like he had traced the Milky Way on the tiles.
“They will become stars,” he said, a gentle smile on his lips. “Just like the wishes we made at Namtso Lake, they will one day shine again in some unexpected place.”
A gust of wind blew by, stirring up dust from the ground and creating tiny vortexes in the air. Ayu suddenly felt that the shape of the vortex resembled an aerial photograph of the Weizhou Island volcano, and the shimmering point of light at the center of the vortex was moving slowly toward the Namtso starry sky at the speed of the water flow from the Yubeng Village Waterfall.
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