En Hiver [ZhouWen/ZheJun]

Chapter 2

Warning: mentions of depression & suicidal thoughts.

What happens when you lose someone? Not necessarily to death, but to life? To distance? To the unknown?

Do you search for them? Or try to go on without them? Do you live in the past tense? Or try to use the present to forget and plan a more relieving future?

What if it gets too sad, too overwhelming... Do you run away? Or stay there and grieve...?

They say that grief is an isolating pain that pacifies with time but it always lingers and never goes away. But what if it only gets more agonizing, tearing you in half, breaking every strength you manage to collect? Do you yield or fight back? Or just create your own reality where the one you lost still exists?

Gong Jun had lost others and mourned many, and now he was mourning another, which holds reason at first, except that the person he mourned wasn't alive at all when he knew him. This frustrating loss was something he had endure to recover some semblance of a normal life, but with him, there wasn't just the grief of loss, but an added grief of not knowing whether A-Xu ever loved him, not knowing what happened to him, where he left and why he disappeared.

After all these years of loss and loneliness, to lose the only warmth he ever felt, in such a cruel, mysterious way, and to have to process this loss, to accept his life without him and have to learn to live in his absence; it was scary, unsettling and overwhelming all at once, especially in the harsh reality of his life.

He spent months waiting for A-Xu to reappear but he never did. No strength of lightning or blare of thunder or burn of jealousy could lure him back; it seemed like he completely vanished. And now A-Xu's presence became a mere memory, not even a gust wind or a fading glow.

A-Xu had told him that souls never die, only bodies wither and souls float into the other side, waiting to cross after closure and then reincarnating into another body. Gong Jun had asked him how long it takes for a soul to come back and A-Xu had gone quiet, thinking of an answer and changing his mind. When a soul has a mission, it will come back to complete it. A-Xu had said, but he didn't seem sure and Gong Jun worried for A-Xu's soul rather than his own, but then A-Xu smiled at him lovingly, it's a sin to separate soulmates, he'd assured him with a kiss.

Gong Jun wondered if he was born too early or too late in this life, too early to meet A-Xu's reincarnation and too late to meet A-Xu when he was alive. Either way, he planned to find him, if not him, then a trace of him, or at least his grave.

At first, Gong Jun thought he'd abandon the world and confine himself to his room, that he would relive every moment he ever had with A-Xu until the day he dies; at least that's how those poems he read described longing and heartache. He was ready to let go of everything, of himself, of any notion of time, and drag his life along until his body perished.

However, he didn't.

A-Xu had told him that he'd always lived as a wanderer, tasting wines of different places and capturing the beauty of the world in his imagination. He'd told him how he'd almost given up on life until someone saved him from the desperation and gave him a new home, a new meaning to his existence. He'd told him that the world is wide and vast, and he should go out there to experience all the pleasures it can offer before it's too late.

That was A-Xu's advice, but it sounded more like a request back then. Maybe deep down in his transparent soul, A-Xu knew that one day he'll fade away and leave Gong Jun trapped alone in this mortal world. Yet then came the wills and the promises, Gong Jun had promised him that he'll stay in this room until the ends of time, that he needed no one else and nothing else but the soft glow of his shape and the beautiful dreams he gave, but A-Xu had only shaken his head, time is endless, he'd told him.