The sun leaked through my fingers.
Xu Xi's hands were too small; she couldn't catch the light. Even when she pressed her fingers tightly together—so tight her knuckles turned white—the light still seeped through the cracks and fell onto her face.
"Brother, look. I can't catch it."
She opened her hand, and the light escaped her palm, flying back into the sky to become a whole sun once again.
No one can catch the light.
But I reached out and covered her eyes.
Back then, I didn't know that the sun, just like a shooting star, could fall.
I told them she was a sun.
They just nodded and wrote in their notebooks: Child prodigy. Exceptional intellect.
But Xu Xi truly was a sun. Wherever she went, shadows ceased to exist. Everything became light itself—walls became blocks of light, the floor a pool of light. I became a being of light simply by standing beside her. Even the blood in my veins felt like her light.
She used to write characters in the palm of my hand.
A horizontal stroke, a vertical stroke, a hook...
Brother.
She would close my fingers, trapping that word inside my palm.
I hid that word away for over twenty years.
But the sun itself was left behind, over a decade ago.
She stood by the sea, on the edge of the cliff, letting the crashing waves shatter the sunlight on the rocks and drag it into the deep.
"Tell me..."
Her final words were like the first snowfall. From that moment on, a frigid night became my entire world.
"If we spend our entire lives, yet never manage to see the world we yearned for, then why do we exist at all?"
...
After she died, the sun vanished.
No... the sun was still there, but it had morphed into a ghastly pale white.
The white of fluorescent lights, of hospital sheets, of report cards. The white of everyone's eyes as they stared at me.
They finally started looking at me. ...Only after Xu Xi died did they finally look at me.
They said, Shu, you have to work hard.
They said, You are Xu Xi's brother.
They said, You share the same blood, so you can do this. You can take her place...
They said I could become her.
Take her place... become her...?
So... my sister wasn't a living, breathing person, but merely a "state of being" that anyone could assume?
So... that pedestal, the praise, the fawning crowds... could it have been anyone?
No. It shouldn't be like this.
They peeled Xu Xi's name off her like the shell of a lychee.
They tossed the shell aside, popped the sweet flesh into their mouths, chewed it up, and swallowed it down. Then, they handed the empty shell to me and said: This is your sister. Hold onto it tightly.
They told me the shell was identical, that it didn't matter who wore it.
It wasn't the same.
How could it possibly be the same?!
...
I will never forget that day.
She stood at the edge of the cliff, the wind whipping at her skirt. Sunlight cascaded down her frail, thin frame, making her look entirely isolated from the rest of the world.
Looking down from her vantage point, I must have seemed so small.
Smaller than a grain of sand, smaller than a fragmented seashell, smaller than the dappled light dancing on the ocean waves.
How could someone as small as me possibly catch someone as immense as her?
But she jumped anyway. She plummeted from the high heavens straight into that unanswerable question, as if falling into a bottomless well.
Meanwhile, I was draped in that dripping, discarded lychee shell the adults had forced upon me. Weighed down by their countless [Expectations], I stood frozen in place, like a concrete utility pole plastered in missing person posters.
It shouldn't have been like this...
...
I wanted to fish her out of that well, but I didn't know how. So, like the thirsty crow from the fable, I tried to fill the well with stones to make the water rise.
I threw answers into the well, one by one.
I threw down every answer I could possibly find.
Answers from textbooks, quotes from famous philosophers, answers from mentors, from friends, from strangers on the internet.
I tied them all together, weighed them down with stones, and sank them into the depths.
Nothing happened.
Not a single echo came from the bottom of the well.
I was wrong again...
Truthfully... I had one last answer.
I felt the real answer was down there at the bottom. Finding it required me to leap into the abyss. The real answer required me to follow in Xu Xi's footsteps.
So, I reached out my hands and gripped the edge of the well.
For the first time, I leaned over and peered into the murky depths.
But instead of the abyss, I saw the reflection of a bright, full moon.
I raised my head and looked up at the sky.
The moon had come out.
When I found that moonlight right on my own doorstep, I couldn't believe it.
But the moon had barged into my long night, illuminating my world once more with its radiant glow.
Everything I was familiar with, everything I had seen, understood, and subsequently abandoned... all of it appeared before my eyes once again.
Standing amidst the ruins, she took the "trash" I had thrown away and pieced together a flower. She said it was simple. She said I could do it too.
I knew I could. I held that flower up to the moonlight.
The light spilled over the well water. Through the pitch-black depths dyed by the night, through my past life, through that suffocating lychee shell, through the suffocating expectations plastered all over my body—I saw the bottom of the well.
Xu Xi wasn't at the bottom of the well.
I was.
The twelve-year-old me. The me wearing the lychee shell. The me covered in missing person posters. The me gripping the edge of the well. The me throwing other people's answers into the abyss, one by one. The me leaning over the edge...
It was me, peering into the depths, only to see the reflection of the moon.
I had been at the bottom of the well this whole time.
I had been sitting in that well like a frog, staring blankly up at a tiny patch of sky, foolishly believing it was my entire world.
And now, she... that girl named Kiana Kaslana, was leaning over the edge of the well, reaching her hand out to me.
"Are you an idiot? Hurry up and give me your hand!"
They always say... moonlight is gentle. But the core of her light was incredibly stubborn.
She forcefully hauled me out of that well, showing absolutely zero respect for whether or not I actually wanted to embrace the world again.
She forced her ideals onto me. She dragged me along to do things I didn't want to do, to go to places I didn't want to go. She took all those things I had defined as "trash" and guided my hands to fold them into flower after flower, recreating the ones I used to dream of—
It was the "sea of flowers" I had spent my entire life searching for.
It was the raw beauty of the world, finally revealed to me after the suffocating dust and noise had been blown away.
Since she barged into my life, she hadn't shown me a single ounce of respect. She was reckless and impulsive, completely turning my established routine upside down.
This wasn't the life I wanted. I had never once fantasized about living like this. Of that, I was absolutely certain.
I didn't like her... That was the logical conclusion.
...
Bullshit.
I love her.
That is the only indisputable truth.
I love this life. I love everything I have now. I love the little "Rice Cake" she brought back with her. I love her, the one who made all of this possible—
And I love the answer she gave me:
If we spend our entire lives, yet never manage to see the future we yearn for...
Then so be it. I'll spend my entire life trying.
At least I'll know... that it's my own problem.
Not the world's.