Confession
The WeChat screen that never changed—it was my plea for you to return, and my confession.
1. Celine
Long ago, this place had been a pond. Then it dried up. The riverbed was overgrown with low shrubs and sedge grass, like a lunar crater that had somehow awakened to life. It seemed all my memories began here.
I crouched down, rummaging through the underbrush, and soon my fingers closed around a small sphere. I gasped and straightened up.
"Did you find it?" my friends called out.
I opened my palm. "Not a tennis ball—just a glass marble."
They praised it: "So pretty, like the moon."
I held the pale golden translucent marble up to the sunlight and saw inverted, hazy shadows of trees; then, closing one eye and peering closer, I could make out distant mountains, and the roof of the Geological Research Institute at their foot.
Between the swaying tree shadows, a narrow silhouette appeared.
The figure walked with a perfectly straight back, at a brisk, purposeful pace. I watched him through the marble, keeping him trapped in its center. Seeing that he was about to pass by without so much as a glance, I called out loudly, "Rowan Luo, good afternoon! Come help us find the tennis ball! It fell in the pit—"
Rowan Luo didn't turn his head or break his stride. Only his peripheral vision flicked toward me, cold and brief. Then he was gone, heading straight for the research institute's residential compound.
"Cece, don't bother calling him. We've got this."
"I know, right? He's going to be an astronaut someday—a big shot!"
My friends teased Rowan Luo, laughing among themselves.
My mood had already soured. I said nothing and raised the marble again, peering through it in every direction.
I saw the distant mountains, the sky, the many rooftops—as if I could see the entirety of my small hometown, the entirety of the earth.
"Time," I said slowly. "There's still a long time."
This was one of my memories.
Why had I said that back then? The cause and effect have long since faded from my mind.
But in recent days, whenever I wake in the middle of the night, thinking of that dried-up pond in my hometown, thinking of Rowan Luo walking past the pit without so much as a sideways glance, my heart fills with an inexplicable loneliness and sorrow.
In memory, time quickly leapt to the end of that school year.
After the last final exam, the tension in the classroom dissolved at once. I suggested, "Let's all go to Meridian Island for summer vacation!" My classmates responded enthusiastically, crowding around to discuss the trip in excited detail. The brilliant late-June sunlight made every face glow—except my desk-mate's.
It was 2012. I was seventeen, at the age of teenage conceit. With my good looks and decent personality, I was the undisputed darling of the class. My classmates always called me "Cece, Cece" with affectionate familiarity, clustering around me. Just like now.
I didn't care about the others. I only asked my desk-mate in a low voice: "Rowan Luo, do you want to come with us to Meridian Island?" Once again, I received only his cold dismissal.
This was his consistent attitude toward everything. A year earlier, he had arrived at our small town as the dependent of a research team and transferred into our class. With an icy expression, he'd introduced himself in just two words—"Rowan Luo"—and never said anything more. He'd never expressed any desire to befriend his classmates, never displayed any emotion other than indifference. He always sat through class and read books without looking sideways, refused all group activities, and strictly adhered to his personal credo of "nothing concerns me."
I had always believed I could win the affection of the entire world. After all, before he appeared, the popular girl that I was had never been given the cold shoulder. What a shame—a lone exception had arrived. Rowan Luo was completely immune to me.
Naturally, I couldn't accept this. For a year I'd actively probed him, casting about for topics from every corner of the earth, hoping to discover his interests as a breakthrough point. But almost every conversation became a one-woman show.
I frequently proposed group activities like outings, but in stark contrast to the enthusiastic participation of other students was Rowan Luo's consistently complete non-response. I persisted, inviting him every single time, and was rejected every single time.
His coldness eroded me. Over the course of that year, I went from being able to shout greetings and directly ask him to help find tennis balls, to treading on eggshells, cautious and careful. The only thing worth praising during this period was my persistence—though it was mixed with other feelings. Thanks to Rowan Luo, I'd developed an obsession with winning his friendship that applied exclusively to him.
So this time, I still refused to give up. I patiently urged him: "Rowan Luo, it's the end of the semester. You've been at this school for a year and you're leaving soon, but you haven't participated in a single class activity.
"We've only been together a short while, but we do have some class camaraderie. Just join us this one last time, how about it? You know, the place we're going—Meridian Island—is the easternmost point of the country. The seaside scenery is beautiful, and it's not far from our town..."
I gave him a earnest introduction. He was silent for a long while, then shook his head.
At last, my smile vanished. I stood up abruptly. The matter ended with me running out of the classroom and crying.
Soon after, Rowan Luo transferred out.
The Meridian Island trip came and went. The whole class took a group photo by the sea, and just like every other class photo that year, Rowan Luo was absent. It was as if he had never appeared in our world at all.
I grieved for a long time. A year of interaction—short when you said it was short, long when you said it was long—yet all I knew about him came from a few words from the teacher. Rowan Luo had joined the National Space Research Talent Development Program early on; in the future, he would become a space researcher dispatched to the cosmos. 2012 was merely an interlude—his parents' research team had come to our small town for classified research, so he'd come along and temporarily attended our high school for a year.
So the reason for his coldness, which seemed like a personality flaw, was simple. His future was too exalted. He looked down on us small-town kids.
I knew all this. But for that one year, to win his attention, I still made many efforts—even writing a love letter with great solemnity. It was returned unopened.
That's right—whether it was the sudden blow to my pride after years of conceit, or my desire to explore the mysterious and unattainable Rowan Luo, or some inexpressible teenage sentiment, my first love was spent right there.
I knew full well that I was just an ordinary girl from a small, isolated town, and he was destined for great things. We didn't belong in the same world. What I'd thought were points of intersection were, in three dimensions, actually planes that never met. We had no connection at all.
Still, that love letter was the only confession of my entire life.
*
Ten years passed in a flash. I was twenty-seven, a single, ordinary woman.
On this winter night, I curled up on the sofa watching television, my mind wandering through the past.
At seventeen, I'd thought I could win the love of the whole world—when really it was just a naive girl mistaking her tiny hometown for the entire world. Rowan Luo's abrupt arrival had shattered all those illusions. He came and went without a sound, merely passing through, yet planted an enduring obsession deep in my heart.
I snapped back to the present. The TV sound suddenly crashed into my consciousness: "...intense cosmic rays passed close to the moon. The second batch of lunar researchers all tragically perished, including three Chinese researchers. They made tremendous contributions to the lunar helium-3 energy extraction program..."
I never expected to see the name "Rowan Luo" again in my lifetime. It appeared on the news, preceded by four characters: "Casualty List." Then the young man's ID photo was displayed.
And so I learned that Rowan Luo's life had indeed taken no detours. He'd become an outstanding space researcher, dispatched to the moon at a young age by the state. Perhaps the only unexpected event in his life came at the very end—in that disaster, he perished in the boundless cosmos.
The feeling was strange. Someone I'd briefly crossed paths with a decade ago—I saw him again only after he'd passed away. It was nothing more than an unrequited, tragic first love, and many years had gone by, yet in this moment, genuine sorrow welled up inside me.
He was dead.
Immense pain radiated from my chest. Not only did I still harbor an obsession with the departed, but I also keenly realized that leaving the earth, bearing an unbearable lightness, and ultimately perishing in the vast emptiness of space was a uniquely horrifying tragedy.
I couldn't dispel the feeling. I took out my phone, wanting to confide in a friend, but I didn't even know how to begin. My phone lagged on the WeChat startup screen. I stared at that screen, and suddenly tears streamed down my face.
A serene, deep blue cosmos. At its center, a blue planet. A tiny figure stood outside the earth, looking at it, leaving only a small and lonely silhouette. It was the image we all knew.
When he was working on the moon, did he gaze at the earth like this from afar?
I couldn't imagine such loneliness.
Yet there was also a strange premonition in my heart.
For a long time, I'd vaguely sensed there was some detail I'd overlooked. Now the feeling was growing more specific, gradually revealing a sorrowful yet uncanny shape.
Just then, the TV broadcast a weather forecast, and a massive satellite cloud map appeared on screen. I reopened WeChat, took a screenshot of the startup page, but my attention shifted from the tiny figure to the earth itself.