A Single Swallow

by Zhang Ling

I am forever thirty-nine. The world of the dead subverts the rules of the living. In the world of the living, I was nineteen years older than you. In the world of the dead, you are just one year younger than me. Death has brought us closer.

Time is a strange thing. It washes away the outer skin of solemnity and reveals the absurd nature of things.

The days were like water, always flowing forward, not looking back, and waiting for no one. Not even these troubled days could stop it. The golden bridge is crossed and the silver bridge beckons We cross each bridge in its turn All the bridges lead us to the western paradise On the path to the nether world you slowly make your way There

The river was higher that day, filled with our tears.

A child. She was still a child. But there wasn’t room for children to grow in hard times. This troubled world was like a knife that didn’t even recognize its own family and cut childhood short. All the

young people who went through it were turned into adults in one swift stroke.

Time is a miraculous thing. It can wear down the thorns of emotion, gradually eroding them to dust, and from this dust, a new sprout grows. That sprout is the power of life.

Isn’t that girl the sprout? The weight of a mountain pressed down upon her, but she could still poke the tip of a living shoot up from under the rocks. Never mind that the sprout is disproportionately small compared to the mountain.

My God, please give her a star, even if it is the smallest one, I said to God. And use this star to guide her, so that she will not be lost. God granted my request. He gave a star, but not to her. I gradually realized

he’d given the star to me. She was my star. She lit my path, showing me the way. I was the one who was lost.

With her gravity, she pulled me back to earth, reminding me that I could not only walk but also find a path. I suddenly had a purpose. I couldn’t save everyone—that was God’s business—but perhaps I could save one person. In God’s eyes, a thousand years was like a day, and a day was like a thousand years. In the same way, one person was a universe, and perhaps the universe was a single person.

My blade hit its mark with precision. The tightly wrapped boil was lanced, and the emotion that had accumulated for so long finally overflowed the banks, and she began to weep bitterly. Stella’s sobs that day can only be described as earth-shattering. They were so dark, they blotted out the sun and so deep they made the mountains tremble. But I was ruthless. My previous error was that I was too softhearted. I had been treating the injury of the heart with medication, forgetting that I was a surgeon. Some injuries had to be healed through surgery, even if there was no anesthesia. I let her finish crying.

would rather riddle you with hate than have a trace of contempt for you. If I have to choose between hate and contempt, then I choose hate.

He didn’t realize that Wende didn’t want the future, just as she didn’t want the past.

especially because subconsciously, for me, it was a comma in the middle of a long sentence, not a period bringing it to an end. It won’t be long till we meet again, I thought.

Compared with our whole lives’ experiences, the time we were in one another’s lives was actually very short, though it looms disproportionately large in the illusion of my memory.

That pathetic little bit of ego interacted with the air like yeast, turning “impossible” into “maybe.” I was unwilling to let go of the place I had held in her heart, though in reality it was already gone.

During those years, opportunity was like a mischievous child playing hide-and-seek with me. When I

looked for it, it hid in dark corners, outside my field of vision. When I stayed put, it ran ahead of me, tempting me to take a false step.

a person’s thinking runs in a straight line when they are young, unaware that there may be a curve, a bend, sometimes even a few various branches, in the journey from information heard to conclusion drawn.

I was only twenty-three at the time, but I felt like an old bird with broken wings. I just wanted to go back to my nest and live out my declining years. Before I had ever really seen the sky, I’d lost my desire to fly.

Wikipedia describes a stroke solely in

terms of poor blood flow to the brain resulting in cell death. I don’t entirely agree with it, though I was once a doctor. There are many possible descriptions of your condition. For instance, from the perspective of meteorology, the symptoms of stroke are the ruins left by a hurricane sweeping through a complex domain with densely distributed waterways and ravines. From a psychological point of view, a stroke is the process by which a person enduring difficulties blocks a memory he doesn’t want to face, like stemming a flood with sandbags.