I had entered the space researcher reserve very early, with a contract spanning twenty years. To preserve my mental health and avoid the inescapable loneliness of living in space, my family required me to focus solely on research and sever all social connections.
So from childhood, I was molded into someone suited for space. I wouldn't fear loneliness in the void, wouldn't suffer from depression, and certainly wouldn't experience hallucinations or other psychiatric symptoms.
Yet now I was having frequent hallucinations. My mind had still broken down.
Every day working on the moon, that girl would sit beside me at the distance of a desk-mate, talking to me nonstop;
Or she would hide in the craters, waving to me endlessly, saying, "Rowan Luo, good afternoon! Come help me find the tennis ball!"
I knew the reason. Dickinson's poem was the best explanation—
/I could have endured the darkness
Had I not seen the sun/
Come to think of it, that poem was also something she told me. She was always so eager to share everything with me.
My mind was a chaotic mess, constantly reliving that year a decade ago when I was an ordinary high school student.
I rejected her fifty-three invitations. I ignored her countless times. When I finally realized I had long since fallen in love with her and gathered the courage to respond just once, she wrote me a love letter.
So I turned away and never harbored hope again.
The sun only made my wretched life produce illusory desires—it only brought me pain. After all, I was someone with no future, unable to offer her one either.
But it wasn't until I rejected her last invitation at the end of the semester that I discovered something even more painful than yearning: regret.
That day she was so angry. She packed her bag after school and walked out without another word—breaking her habit of always saying goodbye to me. I etched her departing silhouette into my heart. That was the last time I saw her, yet I couldn't bring myself to call out to her.
—All I needed to do was rush forward and say "I want to go," and she would have turned around.
Harboring hope was the most terrifying thing.
Every day working on the moon, my mind was overwritten with that second year of high school. Tormented by hallucinations, drifting in and out of consciousness, eventually only she remained beside me, endlessly issuing that final invitation—
Rowan Luo, do you want to come with us to Meridian Island?
Rowan Luo, the semester's almost over. You haven't joined a single class activity yet.
Do you want to come with us to Meridian Island?
...
The regret from ten years ago had become the sole obsession my collapsing mind clung to.
My upbringing had made me someone who sacrificed himself, who possessed a sense of historical mission. I had always followed that teaching—my one and only expression of self was the two words I wrote on my career planning form in second year of high school.
Even those two simple words, I had ultimately crossed out. Let alone illusory feelings. Unfortunately, time carried that year's experiences forward endlessly, and I still ended up with a past of my own.
Only now, as my mind fractured further and my rational defenses crumbled, could I summon the courage again—to voice the response I had buried deep in my heart a decade ago, the one that had relentlessly circled in my mind.
It was also because of this that I survived the disaster, becoming the sole survivor exiled on the moon.
Fortunate enough to survive, yet tragic enough to break one's heart. The abandonment of the time project emptied my twenty years of sacrificed humanity into nothing but hollow words from a man lying alone on the moon.
The single greatest regret of my brief life was rejecting her too many times.
Even now, having finally given my response ten years later, I still couldn't be satisfied.
I so desperately wanted to live—even just once, let me make my own choice.
Celine, I want to go to Meridian Island with you.
I lay down in the hibernation pod and set it for nearly forty years of hibernation.
If everything went well, I would wake on May 26, 2062. Then I could restart the time machine and return to fifty years earlier—May 26, 2012.
On May 26, 2012, humanity's first commercial spacecraft docked with the International Space Station. I would use it to transmit a message to my grandfather, using the truth a decade later to make them reconsider.
Then, at the end of June that year, when she issued her final high school invitation, I could truly respond to her.
Fifty years to meet again. I, waking at sixty-seven, would say this to the seventeen-year-old girl of that year.
I closed my eyes.
3. Us
There are actually many secrets hidden in everyday life.
I had always been someone who took each day for granted, never paying attention to life's small details. For instance, when I saw the WeChat startup page, when I saw that little figure standing in space gazing at the earth, I only ever thought it had a kind of lonely beauty.
Had I ever considered that the image might be a message from someone in another time and space, sent to me?
Living with my husband had made me more imaginative too.
It was 2022. I was twenty-seven, an ordinary married woman.
I woke in the morning with a headache. I had the distinct feeling I'd had many dreams, but they were only fragmented, illogical snippets—essentially unforgettable.
I looked beside me—he wasn't there. My husband had already gotten up, probably in the study.
I wanted to lie in a bit longer, so I burrowed under the covers and pulled out my phone to check WeChat.
WeChat had frozen on the startup page. I looked at that little figure's silhouette and the vivid blue earth, and inexplicably took a screenshot, zooming in to examine it closely. I'd never noticed before—what part of the earth was the little figure on the WeChat startup page looking at?
He was looking at the center of the earth. I made out roughly that the center should be somewhere in Africa.
After replying to a few WeChat messages, I got up and left the bedroom. The study door was ajar. My husband was indeed at his computer, typing away—he was a diligent writer.
"You're up way too early," I said.
"Mm." He looked up from his screen with a smile. "I had a lot of dreams last night, didn't sleep well. Decided to get up early and write."
"I had a lot of dreams too." I walked over and sat beside him. "You probably got up in the middle of the night, didn't you?"
He laughed but didn't answer.
Too lazy to press further, I let my gaze fall on the photo frame beside us.
It was a class photo from second year of high school—our whole class trip to Meridian Island. It was also the first photo my husband and I appeared in together.
Thinking about it, it was funny. At seventeen, I was the popular girl everyone liked, and only my husband was like a block of wood, completely immune to me. But in the end, didn't I win him over?
Doing the math, we'd known each other for quite a long time. He transferred to our town's high school at the start of second year and became my desk-mate. After that, we were just like every other ordinary couple—college entrance exams, university, career—until we ended up together.
The Meridian Island trip in second year was our first photo together. After we married, he said it held great significance and insisted on framing it.
Typical of him—how many couples use a class photo as their keepsake?
Now he propped his chin on one hand, eyes closed, seemingly deep in thought. On his screen was a document of over ten thousand words.
He said earnestly, "It really wasn't easy for us to end up together."
I asked, "Why do you say that?"
He opened his eyes and looked at me, his expression serious. "I feel like I crossed the distance from Earth to the cosmos, crossed a hundred years of time, crossed life and death itself, to win you back."
"..."
I nodded solemnly. I had to admit, these novelists and their imaginations—he made it sound almost real.
I stood up and walked to the door. "Alright, enough nonsense. Come out and eat breakfast."
"Okay, give me a minute." He laughed, stretched, and looked back at the screen, resuming his typing. "Just one more sentence, and I'll finish 'Confession.'"