First Page of the Diary

Lin Shen later thought that if he hadn't opened the first page of the diary that day, he might never have known what Su Wan was thinking about on the afternoon she met him. But some things, the more you know, the heavier they become.

The warehouse district at No. 76 Donghe Street was built in the 1980s. A row of single-story buildings had been converted into storage spaces, with remnants of white brushstrokes from some red slogan still visible on the brick walls. There were fewer streetlights here than elsewhere—every second lamp was dimmed, leaving stretches of asphalt road swallowed in darkness section by section.

Jiang Fei hadn't come with him. After crawling out of the electrical room, she said, "Two people together is too conspicuous." She tossed Lin Shen the motorcycle keys and walked off in the opposite direction. Before leaving, she typed a number into Lin Shen's phone.

"Call this if anything comes up. Don't text me on WeChat—it's not safe." Then she left. Her ash-blue short hair stood completely on end when the alley wind hit it, making her look like a ruffled bird.

Lin Shen walked along the concrete path deeper into the warehouse area, counting until he reached the third steel roll-up door. It was an old-style pull-down lock with a rusty chain fastened to the hasp. The envelope had said "back door"—so he circled around to the rear of the building and found another small door.

The flowerpot was still there. A hexagonal cement pot, the soil inside completely dry and cracked into several pieces. He moved the pot aside. Beneath it lay a copper key, wrapped with a strip of transparent tape, and stuck to the tape was another small sun sticker. The copper keyhole caught the moonlight and reflected—not the color of the copper itself, but a patina formed by repeated friction over time, very shiny.

He inserted the key and turned it half a rotation. The sound of the copper lock springing open echoed several times louder in the quiet warehouse district. Two birds startled from some tree chirped twice.

He pushed the door open. Inside was dark. The air was thick with dust, old wood, and the smell of turpentine.

He felt for the light cord by the door and pulled—no light. He rummaged through his backpack, pulled out his phone, and turned on the flashlight. The beam swept across a small patch of floor. The space was about twenty square meters. On three walls leaned several empty picture frames. Rolls of canvas were stacked on the floor. And in the corner, indeed crouched a wooden chest.

When the flashlight landed on it, he recognized the camphor wood chest from the Polaroid photo—the copper hasp green with age, a crack running diagonally from the top-left to the bottom-right across the wood grain. He crouched down and propped the flashlight against a nearby frame.

The chest's latch was already open. Not forced—the copper lock hung on the hasp, its spring released, as if the last person to open it had forgotten to lock it.

Lin Shen removed the lock and lifted the lid.

Empty.

Inside, the light-colored wooden bottom only had a thin layer of dust. Not even the crease marks left by pressed paper edges. All the paintings were gone—those paintings he had filled with Su Wan's watercolors, those paintings he saw hanging on the wall every day when he came home from work—all gone.

He pressed his palm against the inner wall of the chest and felt from left to right. There was nothing on the wood, not even a trace of charcoal dust. But he didn't close the chest. He took out a pencil and used the eraser end to tap along the four corners of the bottom panel.

The sound changed on the third tap.

The bottom panel wasn't solid.

He slipped the pencil into the gap at the edge of the bottom panel and pried. The board loosened. Beneath it was a compartment, about two centimeters deep. He shone the flashlight inside—a notebook lay there.

A dark gray fabric cover, the corners worn and frayed. On the cover was a white label with a single character written on it: "Wan."

He took out the notebook. The areas where his hand touched the cover felt slightly damp, but the pages were dry. When he opened the cover, he caught the scent—gardenia. Very faint, like a lingering fragrance still identifiable after a very, very long time.

The main text began on the first page. No date, no title. It was filled with Su Wan's slightly right-leaning square characters.

---

"Today marks my 17th day in this world. I was bumped into by someone on the street, and my drawings scattered all over the ground."

Lin Shen sat down. He sat on the floor, his back against the empty camphor wood chest, the flashlight from his phone illuminating the paper. In the upper-left corner of the page was a small sun drawn in blue watercolor. The ink was already very faint, as if it had been rubbed by an eraser after writing and then traced over once more.

"That person was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was a black leather cord tied around his left wrist. While picking up the drawings, he kept saying 'sorry, sorry'—four times in a row, once for each piece he picked up. I was really angry at first. Those were cross-section drawings that had taken me two hours to complete, and now they had a gray footprint smudged across them on the ground. But when he picked up the last one and handed it to me, our fingers touched—his hand was very cold."

Lin Shen swept the flashlight across his own face. On his left wrist was the black leather cord he had worn for three years without changing.

"His name is Lin Shen."

There was a small pause in Su Wan's strokes here. The ink paused, leaving an extra ink dot. The last stroke of the character "Shen" ended a bit hastily.

"He's really handsome."

The flashlight trembled. Lin Shen steadied it by propping his elbow on his knee. The pencil was still in his other hand, the engraving on the clip pressing against his index finger joint.

The second page.

"Day 19. Lin Shen gave me his WeChat ID. The first message I sent him: 'Your drawings are really good, but I think the scale might be slightly off.' He replied with three ellipsis dots. I stared at those three dots and laughed for about half a minute."

Under the flashlight, the more he read, the more the handwriting grew hasty in some places. Small doodles adorned the page edges—a square, a coffee cup, a simple outline of a couch, and a pencil. Next to the pencil was a tiny note: "He taps the table with this when he's drawing."

Lin Shen turned another page. The date had jumped to a month later.

"Day 53. Today she asked me if I could move in with him. I said yes. I lied—I had already thought of a hundred and twenty-three different ways to refuse him before he came to ask... but after he spoke, my tongue felt like it was sealed. When I said 'yes,' my voice was too loud. He was stunned for a moment."

A later page featured a small sketch in pencil lines, depicting a guy sitting on a couch with one foot resting on the coffee table, holding up CAD drawings. In the corner of the portrait was a sun, and beneath the sun were two characters: "Idiot."

Lin Shen smiled in the darkness. Only his lips moved, no sound.

He flipped past the twentieth page. The thirtieth. The fortieth. This diary began from the first day he met Su Wan and ended with the most recent day. He wanted to stop and examine every page in detail—but he didn't dare pause for too long. Outside, the night had grown deep. The Correction Mechanism operatives could find this place at any moment.

He turned the diary directly to the last page.

The handwriting on the last page was different from every page before it. Every previous page, though hasty, had soft lines. Even when writing about sad things, it was like drawing with a pencil—the strokes rose and fell with curves.

Not the last page.

Every character looked as if it had been forcibly carved into the paper.

"If one day I disappear, don't look for me. Live well."

Lin Shen looked closer. Beneath this line, there was another layer of marks on the paper. Traces of being vigorously erased—pencil marks rubbed repeatedly by a brownish rubber eraser. The fibers in this small area had become fuzzy, worn thin. When the flashlight shone through from the back of the page, this spot let through more light than the rest.

He lowered the flashlight and looked at the page from a tangential angle. The pencil marks had left indentations in the paper fibers due to the pressure applied during writing. Even though the surface graphite had been wiped away, the indentations remained. He laid the page flat on the lid of the camphor wood chest and rolled the metal clip on his pencil back and forth across the paper. In the sidelight, the indentations revealed one corner of the words.

Also written with a pen—no, pencil. The graphite traces were indeed erased, but the force used during writing was so deep that a ring of blunt indentations had formed on the back of the paper.

"Don't look for me..."

There were more words. He recognized three or four characters but couldn't make out a complete sentence. Jiang Fei had said that the Correction Mechanism could erase ink and marks, but some chemical reactions between ink and paper fibers were irreversible. An eraser couldn't erase the indentations on the back of the paper, and therefore couldn't erase the truth.

Lin Shen didn't try to distinguish those words with his naked eye any further. He closed the diary and sat in the darkness for a long time. The phone's screen timeout kicked in, the flashlight went out, and the entire warehouse plunged into complete darkness. He could hear his own breathing and heartbeat. He could still smell that hint of gardenia fragrance from another world lingering in the air.

In every page of the diary, she had left specific times, places, and feelings. She wrote about the time Lin Shen cooked for her for the first time and forgot to add salt. She wrote about how she secretly covered him with a blanket when he stayed up drawing until three in the morning. She wrote about that time they went to the beach together—he wrote her name in the sand, the waves washed it away, and he knelt in the sand chasing the retreating tide to write it again. She wrote over two hundred pages. Two years of time compressed within that gray fabric cover.

No matter how much the Correction Mechanism had erased, this diary remained.

She had hidden the diary in the compartment of the camphor wood chest. The compartment was only two centimeters deep—just enough to fit a notebook. Anything more wouldn't have fit. She had been prepared for a long time.

After closing the diary, Lin Shen received a text from Jiang Fei.

It was very short: "They've reached Donghe Street. Leave. Now."

He stuffed the diary into the inner pocket of his coat, pressing it against the watercolor painting and the three Polaroid photos. When he stood up, his knees were numb. He pushed off the ground and his hand touched something small wedged in the gap of the camphor wood chest's bottom panel—smooth texture, hard surface.

He fished it out. It was a Polaroid. In the photo, Su Wan sat on the camphor wood chest, her hood pulled over her head, both sleeves covering her hands completely. She was smiling at the camera—her right dimple was deep. At the bottom of the photo, a line was written in white paint marker.

"You found this place. Love you."

A hand-drawn small sun was sketched beside it, the elongated fifth stroke looping around the final period.

He flipped the Polaroid over. There was nothing on the back. Only the optical reaction of that captured moment—Su Wan's face in the frame, the colors in the pixels still unfaded.

He stood up and tucked the Polaroid into his inner pocket as well. Then he re-hung the copper lock on the chest's hasp, snapping it shut with a click.

From outside came the sound of a car engine. Very close—probably at the entrance to the warehouse district.

He turned off his phone screen and exited through the back door. Half the moon in the sky was obscured by clouds, and the moonlight that leaked through was just enough for him to feel his way along the back wall of the building. When he reached the alley entrance, he saw three beams of car lights sweeping toward the main road of Donghe Street from different directions.

He ducked into the narrow alley beside the convenience store, climbed over a low wall, crossed a pile of discarded cement slabs, and stepped onto another street. Before boarding the subway, he zipped his coat up to his chin.

Inside the subway car, there were only a few night-shift workers. He chose a seat with his back against the carriage wall, pulled the diary out from his inner pocket, and flipped to the last page again. He held the paper up under the overhead light—looking sideways again and again at those erased words.

Suddenly he knew what they were.

The erased words were the same six characters, but in a different order.

Not "Don't look for me."

But rather—"I am waiting for you."

Just as he made out those four blurry indentations, the carriage lights flickered twice, then went out for an instant. When the lights came back on, he flipped back to the first page.

The words on the first page were still there. But the small sun drawn in blue watercolor—only a circle remained. Of the five rays beside it, three were missing.

He flipped through every page quickly. The small suns at the end of each page were fading. Not the text, not the dates, not the diary's content—just the small suns.

The Correction Mechanism was erasing the traces she had left behind. Selectively erasing. First the photos, then the signatures, and now beginning to erase every sun she had drawn.

He closed the diary and pressed his hand against the cover. The wind from the subway tunnel poured into the carriage, mingling with the dull rumble of wheels grinding against the rails—like thunder rolling in from afar on a deep summer night.

He took out his phone and sent Jiang Fei a message. He didn't type—he dialed the number directly.

"Hello."

"I got her diary."

Jiang Fei paused on the other end. "What's in it?"

"She said don't look for her. But she erased one sentence—it said 'I am waiting for you.'"

Jiang Fei said nothing. Her breathing paused in the receiver for a moment.

"Do you believe it?" Jiang Fei finally asked.

"I do."The subway pulled into the station, and the broadcast announced the stop name. Lin Shen stood up. In the second before the doors opened, he opened the diary to the first page for the last time—the little sun had only one ray left, thin and black, like a candle about to be snuffed out by the wind.

He closed the cover.

The doors opened, and he walked out.