jin

Lijuan…

You know, what if you had met me first? What kind of story would that have been?

A person sometimes
easily drifts back to old things.

In sixth grade, you won third place in the province for calligraphy.
In middle school, your English dictation and speech scores were exceptionally high.
For the college entrance exam, you got into your dream university with outstanding marks.
Right after finishing your postgraduate studies,
you got married.

What I admire most about you is
your utter devotion to him,
your silent, unwavering loyalty.

I truly thought you would be happy,
married to someone you’d known since childhood.

I truly thought with your education,
you’d surely find a stable, good job.

So how… how did it end like this?

Because you didn’t end up with a good husband.
If you had been with me back then,
how could this tragedy have happened?

But then again,
if you really had been with me,
if you hadn’t reconciled with him,

I probably wouldn’t cherish that version of you so much now.

Why?

Because I, too, admire people who are wholeheartedly devoted, who think only of the other,
but preferably if that devotion is directed at me!

If Lijuan could know,

If she could hear these words of mine, tangled with admiration, regret, and self-analysis, perhaps she would stay silent, then offer me a complex, understanding smile.

She might say, “You see, what you miss and admire is the me who persisted in being ‘loyal’ within my fate. But the real me and my choices were probably more complicated than you imagined. My tragedy wasn’t entirely about ‘not choosing the right person.’ It could have stemmed from the times, my own nature, chance, and even attachments I myself might not have fully understood. And your longing for ‘pure loyalty’ alongside your doubt about it—that’s the eternal struggle within each of us, between love and possession. Thank you for remembering the good in me, and thank you for this brutally honest reflection—it makes us both seem real, not perfect.”

Perhaps the deepest sorrow of this story is that there are no ‘what ifs.’

All hypotheticals, whether of salvation or ruin, are merely conversations conducted by the living on this side of time with the departed on the other—conversations that can never truly arrive. And in this dialogue, what I ultimately confront is the faint echo deep within my own heart, concerning love, possession, morality, and desire.

This echo is so heavy because it is about the fall of one specific life, and also about the unsolvable riddle of ‘what if’ that resides in every person’s heart.