“Look at the stamp.” Zhong Hua suddenly held the postcard up to the sun. The image of Hukou Waterfall on the stamp revealed hidden patterns under the backlight: the direction of the water flow was actually the shoreline of Namtso Lake, and the shape of each drop of water in the splashing water corresponded to the inns they stayed at during their travels—the tents at Qinghai Lake, the adobe houses in Dunhuang, the wooden houses in Yubeng Village, and even the outline of the bay window in Xingheyuan Community could be found in the reflection of a certain drop of water.
Ayu's fingers traced the hem of the girl's skirt on the postcard, where there was a casual ink stain, its shape strikingly similar to the stethoscope from the hospital where Zhong Hua was born. The edges of the ink stain were slowly expanding at the speed of the Yubeng Waterfall. When the ink stain touched the perforations of the stamp, all the contour lines suddenly lit up with a silver light, and the shadows cast on the ground formed a complete Yubeng pilgrimage route, starting from the old mailbox on the postcard and ending at the balcony of their new apartment.
Suddenly, the glass marbles in Zhong Hua's pocket all glowed simultaneously. The red marbles' fiery clouds blended into the sunset on the postcard, the green marbles' fir shadows climbed the trunks of the sycamore trees in the painting, and within the bubbles of the transparent marbles, the scene of that stormy night in 1999 appeared: a girl in a school uniform tiptoed to put a postcard into the mailbox, the halo of light emanating from the silver bracelet on her wrist was exactly the same style as the dowry bracelet of A Yu's mother. As the girl turned and ran into the rain, the arc of her skirt fluttering was a perfect snapshot of the waves crashing against the rocks of Weizhou Island.
"Who is she?" Ayu's voice trembled slightly. She remembered her mother's old wooden box in the storage room, and the unmailed letter at the bottom of the box, with the same pen marks on the edge of the letter. Zhong Hua, on the other hand, stared at the girl's profile on the postcard and suddenly remembered the old photo tucked in his grandfather's logbook—in 1978 on Moon Street, his grandmother in work clothes was standing under the same sycamore tree, clutching an envelope, the pattern of the stamp perforations exactly the same as this one.
A sudden gust of wind swirled up scraps of paper from the demolition debris. Among them, a yellowed flyer drifted past a postcard, the words "Tides and star trails in sync" written in pencil on the blank back. Ayu recognized Zhong Hua's handwriting; he had written the same sentence in his notebook last week while stargazing at Namtso Lake. The flyer's illustration was an unfinished model of a residential complex, and the location of the fountain in the model corresponded precisely to the moon's reflection in the puddle on the postcard.
As the repairmen began packing up their tools, a 1999 coin fell from the bottom of the old mailbox as it was being loaded onto the truck. Zhong Hua picked it up and noticed that the pattern of the national emblem and wheat ears on the reverse side matched an aerial photograph of the wheat fields in his hometown. The number of serrations on the coin's edge also corresponded to the number of provinces they had traveled through. When sunlight shone through the coin, its shadow fell onto the postcard, perfectly filling in the missing wave crest in the painting of the sea—that curve was the spiral at the very top of the conch shell on Weizhou Island, and also the angle of the sycamore leaves outside the delivery room window when Zhong Hua was born.
“Let’s go back.” Ayu carefully placed the postcard into the inner pocket of her jacket, her fingertips touching the hard object at the bottom—an ice-blue pebble she had picked up in Yubeng Village, now resonating with the waves depicted on the postcard through the fabric. Zhong Hua nodded, casually putting the glass marble back into his bag, only to find that the wave pattern embroidered on the bottom of the bag had somehow changed to the same one on the postcard, the crests of the waves even holding the silvery glow of the Namtso starry sky.
As they walked out of the demolition site, the setting sun was painting the glass curtain wall of the newly built subway station orange-red. Ayu looked back and saw the green outline of the old mailbox gradually shrinking in the back of the truck, but suddenly realized that the curvature of the mailbox top was exactly the same as the shape of the Weizhou Island volcano crater, and the shadow of the iron fence of the mailbox opening was drawing the contour lines of Yubeng Waterfall on the ground.
Zhong Hua's phone suddenly vibrated. It was a photo sent by her mother: the old wooden box in the storage room had been opened at some point. On the faded letter paper, next to the peony pattern embroidered by her mother, lay a postcard from 1999—sent to "No. 7 Moon Street". In the street scene sketch on the back, a girl in a school uniform turned around and looked back. Her profile was exactly the same as A Yu's when she was young. And in the puddle at her feet, what was reflected was not a sycamore leaf, but the entire Milky Way of Namtso Lake.
At that moment, the postcard in Ayu's pocket suddenly became hot, and the contour lines of the sacred waterfall formed by the perforations of the stamps were glowing. The coin in Zhonghua's palm also felt warm—that temperature was just like the warm current surging under the ice of Namtso Lake when they watched the sunrise. It was connecting the torrential rain of 1999, the tides of Weizhou Island, the icefall of Yubeng Village, and all the unsent thoughts into a secret route in time and space, with the frequency of a heartbeat.
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