Unsent letters in the light belt
The light strip in the waiting room, like a galaxy suddenly severed, split into countless thin streams amidst Zhong Hua and A Yu's exclamations. These flowing threads of light didn't resemble water, but rather solidified fragments of memory, each shimmering with a warm, milky-white halo. And what floated within these streams of light made A Yu instinctively hold her breath—letters, countless letters sealed in different materials and colors, suspended and swirling in a manner defying the laws of physics, like time capsules sealed in amber.
"Look over there!" Zhong Hua's voice trembled almost imperceptibly as he pointed to a stream of light heading northwest. The light was amber, like melted honey, and floating within it was a blue-bordered airmail envelope, its kraft paper texture gleaming with a warm, old-world yellow hue under the light. Almost instinctively, Ayu reached out, and the moment her fingertips touched the light, a familiar scent—a mixture of camphor and old paper—filled her nostrils. The envelope gently settled into her palm, the perforations of the stamp on the edge clearly visible under the light.
“1985…” Ayu read the blurry year on the postmark, her fingers tracing the stamp's design before she suddenly paused—it was a discontinued nautical-themed stamp, and the perforations beneath the sail pattern weren't neat straight lines, but rather irregularly spaced holes. When she held the envelope up to the light, the light filtering through those holes formed a set of latitude and longitude numbers. “Weizhou Island…” she murmured, her heart skipping a beat. The seashells they had found on the volcanic rocks of Weizhou Island that year seemed to have similar irregular spiral patterns on their inner surfaces.
At the same time, Zhong Hua also "scooped up" something from a stream of silvery-blue light. It was a yellowed postcard, depicting an old train station that had long since been demolished, with a clear postmark date of "June 18, 2010." "This is from the day I graduated from university." His fingertip traced the back of the postcard, where there were no words, only a few faint creases, as if it had been repeatedly folded and unfolded. Ayu leaned closer, smelling a very faint ink scent from the edge of the postcard, the same kind of ink Zhong Hua used to write his graduation thesis. "Were you planning to send something that day?"
Zhong Hua shook his head, his memory becoming exceptionally clear under the light: "After the graduation ceremony, I bought this postcard at the old post office, intending to write it to my grandfather, but I didn't finish it..." His voice trailed off as he noticed a small sun drawn lightly in pencil in the lower right corner of the postcard, exactly like the signature on his grandfather's account book.
The brightest light stream was at the center of the band of light, a nearly transparent cyan-blue, like the color of the deepest part of Namtso Lake. Floating there was a stack of letters bound with blue silk thread. When Ayu reached out to take it, her fingertips first touched the embroidery on the edge of the letter paper—not ordinary patterns, but the outline of Bird Island in Qinghai Lake densely embroidered with silver thread, even the shapes of several iconic reefs on the island were depicted in exquisite detail. This was the long-lost "three-dimensional embroidery" technique that she had seen in her mother's embroidery.
“Look at the letter…” Zhong Hua’s fingers gently turned to the top page. The letter was a strip of yellowed Xuan paper, on which a half-finished sentence was written in wolf-hair brush: “When the first ray of light swept across the prayer flags of Bird Island, I suddenly remembered…” The ink shimmered with fine gold dust in the light, but what made their pupils shrink even more was the handwriting—the pressure points at the turns and folds of the brush were exactly the same as the handwriting they had used to record their travelogues together. Ayu remembered that morning at Qinghai Lake, when she held Zhong Hua’s hand and wrote down the sunrise in her notebook; the touch of the pen tip gliding across the paper seemed to still linger on her fingertips.
"Who wrote this?" Ayu's voice trembled. She turned to the last page of the letter and found a tiny pattern embroidered in silver thread on the back—two overlapping footprints, the marks they had drawn in the snow with their trekking poles when they were circumambulating Yubeng Village.
Just then, all the streams of light suddenly began to tremble violently, and the floating letters, as if drawn by an invisible hand, converged towards the center of the band of light. The azure light stream emitted a soft hum, the outline of Bird Island embroidered with silver thread began to glow, and the ink of unfinished sentences flowed, as if to complete the final writing. Ayu and Zhonghua subconsciously tightened their grip on each other's hands, and saw the band of light rapidly contract as if sucked into a black hole, finally condensing into a pea-sized particle of light, hovering above their palms.
The explosion of the light particles was silent, only countless golden ash particles slowly rising. Unlike ordinary paper ash, these ash particles were not light and airy; instead, they glowed, arranging and combining in the air to outline clear lines. Ayu recognized it as the pilgrimage route around Yubeng Village—starting from Xidang Hot Spring, winding up the Lancang River canyon, crossing the 3700-meter-high Nanzong Pass, then passing the Ice Lake and the Sacred Waterfall, finally returning to the exit of the Nylon Canyon. The curvature of each section of the route, the altitude of each pass, perfectly matched the GPS track they had recorded during their trek.
“Look at the Ice Lake…” Zhong Hua pointed to the brightest spot in the ash trail, where the ash was gathering into icy blue specks of light, much like the bubbles embedded in the blue ice they had seen in the Ice Lake. At the Divine Waterfall, the ash transformed into fine silver threads, like countless droplets of water falling from the sky. Even more amazing was the constantly changing intensity of the fluorescence along the entire trail. The section from Xidang to Nanzong Pass glowed with a sunrise-like orange light, the light they had seen when they set off at dawn; the Ice Lake area was a crisp blue, reflecting the chill of the high-altitude glaciers; and the final destination, Nylon Canyon, shone with a warm golden hue, much like the sunset they had witnessed as they emerged from the canyon.
The trail of ashes swirled in the air, forming a three-dimensional loop. At the center of the loop, the images of an airmail letter from 1985, a postcard from 2010, and a silver-threaded letter raft flickered in and out of view. Ayu suddenly remembered her mother saying that true memories never disappear; they simply transform into another form, hidden in the folds of time. Like these unmailed letters, they were sealed within the band of light, waiting for a moment of resonance to piece together the forgotten stories.
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