Tides and star trails on postmarks
Amidst the roar of bulldozers during urban renewal, as the old mailbox was uprooted, rust flakes fell like peeling scales at Ayu's feet. She crouched down and saw the repairman pour an oil paper package from the peeling green paint inside the mailbox. The wax seal still bore the 1999 postmark—the words "Moon Street Post Office," long since disappeared from the map, stubbornly resisting the oxidation of time.
"Here, all the letters that haven't been mailed." As the worker handed her the oilcloth bag, the edge of the canvas brushed against the mud stains on her down jacket. These were from when she and Zhong Hua were surveying the demolition site this morning; the hiking boots they brought back from Yubeng Village still had the red soil of the plateau on them, but now they were about to step on the rubble of their soon-to-disappear streets and alleys.
The oil paper wrapping felt heavy in her palm, like a sponge soaked with the weight of time. The moment Ayu tore open the wax seal, the mixed smell of camphor and mildew suddenly reminded her of her mother's dowry wooden chest—the old chest containing peony embroidery patterns and a yellowed family portrait, which was now lying in the corner of their new apartment's storage room. At the bottom of the chest were concert tickets from 2008, the pink and purple glow sticks resembling the sunset over Qinghai Lake in the sunlight.
The postcard that rolled out of the bag had brittle edges, and the postmark date "June 17, 1999" was blurred by ink, but it was like a thumbtack that suddenly pinned Ayu's breath in place. She remembered Zhong Hua saying that he was born in a rainstorm on the eve of the summer solstice that year, and when the midwife held the swaddled baby, the sycamore leaves outside the window were shining brightly in the lightning.
"No. 7 Moon Street"—the address was written very lightly with a fountain pen, the nib pausing slightly on the "7," much like Zhong Hua's habit when writing travel notes. Ayu flipped through the postcard, and the street scene sketch on the back made her fingertips tremble: under the crooked plane tree, the bicycle shed's iron frame hadn't rusted yet, and the outline of the residential buildings under construction in the distance was clearly the first phase of their current "Star River Garden" community. In the drawing, a girl in a school uniform was tiptoeing to reach the mailbox, and the shape of the exposed metal where the green paint had peeled off perfectly matched the chipped seashell they had found on Weizhou Island the previous week.
"Ayu?" Zhong Hua's voice came from the demolition debris pile. He held up a piece of a bus stop sign with "2007" engraved on it. The glass shards embedded in the crack shimmered with an icy blue light in the sunlight. "Look at this, doesn't it look like the icicles from the frozen lake in Yubeng Village?"
As he approached, a cloth bag fell out of his overalls pocket, from which rolled glass marbles arranged in a circle next to the postcard. The fiery clouds in the red marble were the sunset over Qinghai Lake, the tree shadows in the green marble were the fir trees of Yubeng Village, and the bubble in the center of the transparent marble was now reflecting the waves on the postcard—the curve of the wave crest perfectly matched the spiral pattern of the Weizhou Island conch shell in Zhong Hua's palm, as if someone had precisely measured the trajectory of the tides with a compass.
“Postmark date…” As Ayu handed over the postcard, her fingers brushed against the edge of the stamp. It was an 80-cent stamp featuring the Hukou Waterfall on the Yellow River, but the arrangement of the perforations was unusual: seven perforations horizontally and five vertically, forming a dot matrix that cast shadows in the sunlight, exactly like the contour lines of the sacred waterfall in Yubeng Village—she remembered that in a teahouse in Lower Yubeng Village, Zhong Hua had once traced the same curve with a pencil on a napkin, while the mist from the sacred waterfall condensed into tiny droplets on the back of his hand through the wooden window.
Zhong Hua's fingertip hovered over the postmark of "June 17, 1999," and his fingertip suddenly felt the embossed texture on the back of the paper—the marks left by the pen when drawing the waves. The frequency of the waves' rise and fall coincided with the fetal heart rate monitoring curve in his mother's medical record on the day he was born. He remembered his father saying before he died that the torrential rain had washed away the eaves of the old alley, and when he cried in his swaddling clothes, the rain outside the window was running down the metal of the mailbox on Moon Street, the rhythm of the tapping matching the strokes of the pen on this postcard.
“No. 7 Moon Street…” Ayu suddenly remembered something, took out her phone from the inside pocket of her windbreaker, and opened the map app. When she zoomed in on the satellite image of Xingheyuan Community, she discovered that the location of the unit entrance of Building 11 corresponded exactly to the corner of the bicycle shed in the postcard sketch. Even more astonishingly, the outline of the fountain in the center of the community was exactly the same shape as the puddle at the girl's feet in the drawing, and the shadow of the sycamore leaves reflected in the puddle was now being cast at the same angle onto the balcony of their new apartment.
Zhong Hua crouched down and traced the outline of the street scene on the postcard with his fingertips. The pen lines paused deliberately on the trunk of a sycamore tree, where a blurry arrow pointed to the gap in the mailbox base. He remembered the nautical logbook that had fallen out of his grandfather's old leather trunk when he was tidying up the attic last week. On a page from June 1999, there was a pocket watch shaped like an anchor, its hands stopped at four in the morning—the very moment when they watched the Milky Way at Namtso Lake, when the lake was frozen over.
“There’s something in here,” Ayu suddenly pointed to the curled corner of the postcard. Peeling back the worn paper, half a yellowed note was revealed, with the words “Wait for the tide to recede” written in pencil. The pressure points in the handwriting were exactly the same as those used by Zhonghua’s father when writing prescriptions. On the back of the note, an unfinished sun was drawn in crayon, and the color gradient of the crayon matched the color scheme of the rainbow scarf Ayu’s mother had knitted—the same indigo gradient they had seen at the tie-dye workshop in Dali.
The bulldozers suddenly stopped, and as demolition workers walked by carrying their toolboxes, the bells on their keychains jingled dully—a sound that reminded Ayu of the watchman's drum she had heard in Fenghuang Ancient Town. Zhong Hua, however, was stunned: the order of the keys matched the lighthouse signal frequency recorded in his grandfather's logbook. In that instant the keys clinked, the waves on the postcard seemed to come alive; the white foam on their crests flowed in the sunlight, its speed mirroring the breathing rhythm of the coral polyps they had witnessed while diving on Weizhou Island.
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