Memory Prism of Suspended Water Droplets
Zhong Hua's fingertips had just left the bronze hands of the clock, the cool metallic touch still lingering on her fingertips. At 10:18, the soft ticking of the second hand across the mark was abruptly stopped, and the entire waiting room seemed to be paused—not a gradual blur, but a sudden, absolute stillness. Dust particles suspended in the air maintained their parabolic trajectories, the distant sound of construction workers' electric drills was stuck at the crest of the sound waves, and even the water droplets still clinging to A Yu's hair seemed to hang in mid-air, reflecting the stark white light of the overhead lamp.
That 0.1 second felt like an eternity.
Ayu subconsciously looked at the glass surface of the wall clock, and the dusty mirror suddenly transformed into a two-way mirror. The left side clearly reflected her current appearance: her windbreaker was stained with dust from the new subway station construction site, and oil stains clung to her forehead from moving steel bars. Behind her was a cold, gleaming glass curtain wall, reflecting the unfamiliar skyline after the city's redevelopment. But the right side of the mirror overlaid another scene—a faded green mailbox stood at the entrance of an old alley, rust winding along the mail slot. A girl with pigtails was tiptoeing, stuffing a postcard inside, her red plastic sandals stepping on the 1999 bluestone slabs, the heels wedged into the moss in the brickwork.
The girl was wearing a faded floral dress, the peony pattern on the hem exactly the same as the tablecloth her mother embroidered. Ayu's heart skipped a beat. She saw the waves sketched in pencil on the back of the postcard, the curve of the wave crests overlapping the reflection of the zipper pull on her windbreaker.
"Buzz—"
The hum of the pendulum tore through the stillness. It wasn't the typical ticking of a mechanical clock, but a deep, metallic vibration, like countless strings being plucked simultaneously. Ayu covered her ears, only to find that the sound wasn't transmitted through her eardrums, but vibrated directly in her chest—it was the dull thud of camel bells worn smooth by the wind and sand in the Gobi Desert of Dunhuang at night; it was the roar of icicles crashing against the lake surface as they fell beneath the sacred waterfall of Yubeng Village; and it was the faint sound of cosmic dust rubbing against each other, seemingly audible as the stars orbited in the night sky above Namtso Lake at an altitude of over 5,000 meters. These three frequencies overlapped, condensing into visible ripples in the air, like pebbles thrown into the center of a lake, spreading out in concentric circles around the clock.
The moment the ripples swept across the platform tiles, all the dust in the cracks was shaken up, and then fine water droplets seeped out. These droplets didn't fall to the ground; instead, they floated upwards against gravity, gathering in mid-air. Ayu looked up and saw the water droplets, as if molded by an invisible hand, gradually outline a familiar shape—a gap in a crater, radial patterns formed by cooling magma, and the concentric circle structure unique to submarine volcanoes.
“Weizhou Island…” Zhong Hua’s voice trembled with disbelief. He had once swum close to the volcanic rock while diving, and every groove his fingertips traced was exactly the same as the three-dimensional model in front of him.
At the center of the model, a spot of light suddenly illuminated. It had no fixed shape, like a burning flame, yet radiated a warm, orange-red hue—the color of sunrise over Qinghai Lake. As the first rays of sunlight pierced the clouds and sprinkled across the lake, they dyed the vast expanse of blue waves the color of liquid amber. The flickering of the light spot was extremely rhythmic, each flash precisely corresponding to the beating of Zhong Hua's chest. Ayu could hear his heartbeat, steady and powerful, like a prism formed from memory and time suspended above their heads, slowly rotating to this rhythm.
The first beam of light shot out from the prism, a warm orange-red. Within the beam flowed dynamic images, not a continuous playback of film, but a mosaic of countless fragments—the sunrise over Qinghai Lake is not a single, complete scene, but broken down into hundreds and thousands of moments: the instant the clouds parted, the silhouettes of waterbirds skimming through the golden light, the textures of waves carrying fine sand as they surged onto the mudflats. Ayu saw herself squatting by the lake, scooping up handfuls of water, sunlight dancing through her fingers in her palms, while off-screen, Zhonghua's laughter rang out, saying she was holding the entire sun in her hands.
Immediately afterward, a beam of indigo light cascaded down. It was the color of the Yubeng Village icefall, a deep, ethereal blue unique to glaciers, cold and clear. The beam of light froze the moment the ice crystals fell, yet extended it infinitely in slow motion—the cracks spreading like a spiderweb as the ice crystals shattered, each flying ice shard clearly visible, tracing silvery arcs in the air. Ayu remembered that stormy day; her wrist, stung by bee stings, still ached. Zhong Hua had gently applied honey with a cotton swab, and on the stainless steel workbench, their overlapping shadows resembled the flying apsaras in the Dunhuang murals. Now, the roar of the icefall and the sweet scent of honey from that time simultaneously appeared in the beam of light, transforming into a tangible chill and warmth.
The central pillar of light was pure white, like the starry sky above Namtso Lake. Not the few solitary stars barely visible in the city, but the dazzling Milky Way cascading down from the plateau at an altitude of over 5,000 meters. Spots of light formed star trails within the white pillar, the handle of the Big Dipper slowly rotating, each star's brightness exactly matching their observations from the night they stargazed. Ayu saw herself and Zhong Hua lying by the lake, wrapped in down jackets, their heads resting on their backpacks. Zhong Hua was using a star map on his phone, his finger tracing the sky, saying that the signal frequency of a certain pulsar sounded somewhat like the pendulum of his grandfather's clock. At that moment, the rotation of the star trails overlapped with their memory of the conversation; they could even see their breath condensing into tiny ice crystals in the cold night sky within the white pillar.
“Look…” Zhong Hua pointed to the boundary between the orange-red and indigo pillars of light. There, the light band was undergoing a wondrous transformation. The liquid gold of Qinghai Lake met the solid, deep blue of the Yubeng Icefall; instead of colliding, they merged into a flowing, sandy texture—the color of the Dunhuang Gobi Desert. The silhouette of a camel caravan emerged from the pillars of light, and the hum of bells rang out again, creating a more complex resonance with the vibrations of the clock. Ayu saw herself and Zhong Hua riding camels, moving forward under the setting sun over the Singing Sand Dunes, the rhythm of the camel bells synchronized with their breathing, and the distant sand dunes coinciding with the patterns in the pillars of light.
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