Back then, He Yu had even believed it—believed that Xie Qingcheng was determined to leave because his time was up.
As it turned out, this was the actual truth…
Ten years. Xie Qingcheng should have accompanied him up until he graduated senior high. But after the Qin Ciyan incident, Xie Qingcheng didn’t hesitate. He would happily forgo extra wages if it meant he could leave He Yu. How terrified had he been?
He conspired with He Jiwei to lie to He Yu, but he could still speak of great principles with such calm conviction, telling him that this was how normal relationships came to an end.
All of the rationality belonged to Xie Qingcheng, while He Yu seemed like an immature, unreasonable clown.
So stupid…
It was all a lie!
A lie!
Those words that Xie Qingcheng had once said to encourage him, the ones that had maintained his sense of self as he struggled through the agony of a flare-up, were indeed no more than the empty platitudes a psychiatrist told their patient.
Just like a surgeon would tell a late-stage cancer patient, “You still have hope if you hold on.” But the doctor already knew that there was no hope.
Like police would persuade a youth on the verge of suicide by saying, “You’re not ugly. Why would you think that way? Everyone is special. There will always be someone who likes you. Come down, give me your hand.” But could the police really not see the young man’s hideous face and flabby body?
Those were just the emptiest of consolations.
Xie Qingcheng’s views on treatment and the principles that guided He Yu to integrate into society had once given He Yu ten years’ worth of support; even though Xie Qingcheng chose to leave in the end, He Yu hadn’t felt any hatred toward him.
He strove to understand the principles of which Xie Qingcheng spoke, he tried to understand the end of a relationship between two normal people that Xie Qingcheng described.
In the end, he’d made peace with Xie Qingcheng’s choice and with himself. But he hadn’t expected that none of Xie Qingcheng’s words were sincere, that they were just a doctor’s method of treatment, some pretty words. Even the contract period Xie Qingcheng had told him about was an invention.
He Yu found himself thinking of the time he and Xie Qingcheng bumped into a gay couple at the dining hall; at the time, both of them had been very uncomfortable and rose in unison to change seats. He’d felt a little surprised and asked Xie Qingcheng, Aren’t you a doctor? How come you can’t bear to see them either?
Xie Qingcheng had told him back then that a doctor’s medical philosophies were entirely separate from their personal opinions. As a doctor, he did believe that homosexuals didn’t have any mental problems, but as Xie Qingcheng the individual, he personally couldn’t accept that kind of relationship at all.
Now He Yu understood very clearly.
As a doctor, Xie Qingcheng was willing to guide him toward society, to treat him like a normal person. But as Xie Qingcheng, he hadn’t developed any sort of connection with He Yu. Not only did Xie Qingcheng leave He Yu of his own volition—He Yu couldn’t help but recall that Xie Qingcheng had once had Xie Xue keep her distance from him as well.
Xie Qingcheng had been frightened—he’d run, he’d rather not earn more money if it meant that he and his family could get further away from He Yu…
He Yu leaned back into the armchair, staring at it all with his chin in his hand. Slowly, he began to smile. His lips were razor thin; from the side, their upward curve seemed somewhat sinister.
“Are all you doctors really so insincere?” he murmured softly to that lonely white wall. The wound on his shoulder was still covered in bandages. Blood seeped out, followed by a dull throb of pain that spread from the wound like snake venom to his fingertips and heart.
“What a great disguise you wear…Xie Qingcheng.”
At that moment, He Yu suddenly felt that everything he’d done in the past was ridiculous, like a joke—what was the point of “controlling one’s inner heart?” What “shackles of illness” could be thrown off?
In the past few years, what exactly had he been striving for, insisting on, and believing in?
He slowly closed his eyes. Along with the throbbing of the gunshot wound in his shoulder, the scars on his wrists also seemed to sting faintly. He wondered how Xie Qingcheng had managed to go so far with his falsehoods, covering his eyes with both hands and having him follow along so ignorantly and stupidly for so long.
Xie Qingcheng said to him that being sick was nothing to fear.
Xie Qingcheng told him that he could say “it hurts” when he was in pain, that he could ask for sweets, that no one would laugh at him.
With every word, Xie Qingcheng had knocked down the sturdy fortress around his heart. He Yu had once thought that what Xie Qingcheng had extended to him was a pair of warm outstretched hands, but in the end, it was no more than an ice-cold knife.
He Yu protected himself very well, but Xie Qingcheng’s knife had stabbed hard into the depths of his heart.
It was too tragic.
He Yu had lived nineteen years wearing a flawless mask. He never said anything genuine to others, nor did he receive much sincerity in others’ words. In those nineteen years of pain and sickness, Xie Qingcheng was actually the only one to ever ask him, “Doesn’t that hurt?”
Doesn’t that hurt…
He Yu slowly stood up from the armchair, lifting a hand and pressing it over his heart.
He looked at the earth-shatteringly cold messages in front of him, as if he were standing in the bone-piercing gale of a winter blizzard. He lowered his head, bent down, and slowly began to laugh…
It was so funny. It seemed as though he’d truly, actually, genuinely experienced how terrifying pain could be.
Was this what it meant to hurt? This deception, all of his futile struggles, all of his idiocy and loneliness…
If this was what it was like, he’d rather have gone on living numbly forever. What was wrong with being a stalk of grass? Why did his heart have to be ravaged by lies?
He read onward, page after page, file after file, message after message, poring over everything line by line, every word like a knife to his heart. He’d always thought his heart was thickly calloused, but in this moment, it hurt so much it felt as if his own flesh didn’t even belong to him anymore…didn’t belong to him…
He Yu reached up to touch his forehead. His fingertips were ice- cold and all his limbs felt numb. He’d learned enough. He suddenly rose, violently sweeping everything off of the tea table in front of him. Shattered fragments crashed across the floor.
Panting, he went to find the projector remote, picked it up, and tried to close this Pandora’s box. But…
At that very moment, amidst this exploding star of messages, he saw a text belonging to Xie Xue.
It had been sent six years ago. On his birthday.
Xie Xue: Gege, Auntie Li’s sick. I’ve gone with her to get an IV. When will you be back from your work trip? These hospital procedures are so confusing, my head hurts. I wish you were here…
When He Yu first saw this message, all he felt was a gentle tug in his mind, like a moth that had yet to realize it had landed in a spider’s web. But after a few seconds ticked by, he suddenly looked up, staring at that message in disbelief. The moth in the spider’s web began to struggle, flapping furiously, iridescent dust falling from its wings, its fluttering movements stirring an earthquake in his memories.
Six years ago?
On his birthday?
That day…
That day, hadn’t Xie Xue been with him?