Just in Time Chapter 68
Translated by Sylver (ko-fi)
Chapter 68 Heart
Yi Chenliang woke up abruptly, gasping for air. He stared at the dim ceiling above him and wiped his face with his hand.
He wiped off a hand of cold sweat.
He must have had a nightmare, but he couldn’t remember the content of the dream. After waking up, he only felt scared.
He reached out to pick up his phone. The screen showed that it was 6:18 in the morning.
The sky outside was just beginning to brighten. He groggily recalled calling Yun Fang last night, but after waking up, he inexplicably missed him.
He really wanted to hug Yun Fang, to hold him in his arms, to kiss him gently and meticulously as Yun Fang had done before, feeling his existence.
This sudden longing was inexplicably strong, and with it came a vast sense of unease.
Yi Chenliang frowned and picked up his phone to call Yun Fang.
There was only a busy tone, no one answered.
Yi Chenliang got up from the bed, not knowing why the unease in his heart became more intense. He didn’t even have time to wash up before he ran to the residential building opposite and knocked on the familiar door on the fourth floor.
He suddenly hoped that the person who would open the door was Yun Fang. He would look at him sleepily, give him a gentle smile, quietly look at him, or reach out to touch his head out of habit.
He waited for a while before someone came to open the door. Tang Yi was wearing a thin coat, her expression haggard, and her gaze at him was somewhat strange, “Who are you looking for?”
“Auntie.” Yi Chenliang felt something was wrong. Tang Yi had always been enthusiastic about him, so why was her gaze so strange now? “I’m looking for Yun Fang.”
Hearing Yun Fang’s name, Tang Yi’s face showed a pained expression that she couldn’t hide no matter what. She looked at him with red eyes, her voice filled with sadness, “You are Sugar’s former classmate, right? Sugar…he left last summer.”
Yi Chenliang was stunned for a moment, unable to understand her meaning for a while, “Left?”
“He has been dead for several months.” Tang Yi covered her mouth and started crying. She looked much older and frailer than Yi Chenliang remembered. “Thank you for coming to find him.”
Yi Chenliang looked at her blankly, “Auntie, I’m Yi Chenliang. Yesterday, I was still going to school with Yun Fang——”
“Stop talking!” Tang Yi seemed unable to bear his words and cried as she closed the door.
The cold security door suddenly became so strange, tightly closed in front of him.
Yi Chenliang descended the stairs in a daze, repeatedly dialing Yun Fang’s mobile number on his phone.
From no one answering at first to being turned off, it finally became an empty number.
The cold female voice on the phone repeated this cruel reality to him over and over again.
Yi Chenliang ran to the school.
In the noisy Class 10 of Grade 1, he grabbed Ji Shumo and asked, “Where is Yun Fang?”
Ji Shumo looked at him with a puzzled face, “Who is Yun Fang? Brother Yi, what’s wrong with you?”
“My deskmate!” Yi Chenliang gritted his teeth and pointed to his seat, looking up, “He was sitting there——”
Yi Chenliang’s voice faltered, and he stood there with a vacant look in his eyes.
In the last row of the classroom, there was only one desk lonely placed in the last row. The cup he used to drink water yesterday and half a pack of White Rabbit milk candy were still on the side of the desk.
The milk candies scattered on the edge of the table, a few fell on the ground.
Yi Chenliang walked to his seat, flipped out a few pieces of draft paper from the physics book. On them were the little stick figures he and Yun Fang drew when they were bored in class. They always drew one when they had nothing to do, secretly passing notes under the teacher’s watch.
For this, they were severely reprimanded by Old Fang.
On the paper, there was always a round-headed stick figure and a square-headed stick figure huddled together affectionately, with strange speech bubbles on their heads, exchanging some cryptic codes that only they understood.
Yi Chenliang lowered his head to look at the draft paper, his hand holding the paper trembling slightly.
On the draft paper, only the round-headed stick figure was left, fiercely topped with a speech bubble. The words in the bubble were his own handwriting, but he didn’t know who they were talking to.
It was like a person’s schizophrenic self-talk.
He ran to Yun Fang’s shop, but found that it had become a strange ramen restaurant. People were coming and going inside, Sister Zhao and Brother Huang were gone, only strangers were left.
He opened his phone and found that the four-person group had become a three-person group. He couldn’t find Yun Fang in his friend list and contact list, and he even had some trouble remembering Yun Fang’s face.
A great panic engulfed Yi Chenliang, he looked around and felt incredibly strange.
Yun Fang was disappearing from his world.
To be precise, Yi Chenliang, twenty years later, was disappearing from his world.
The memory of his first encounter with Yun Fang began to blur. Yun Fang carrying him home, Yun Fang dragging him to run on the street, Yun Fang and him chatting on the bed, Yun Fang and him doing problems together, Yun Fang kissing him, Yun Fang and him messing around at night…Countless familiar scenes of the two of them together in his mind, Yun Fang’s figure was slowly fading.
Originally a picture of two people, gradually only he was left alone.
No matter how he recalled, he couldn’t remember the appearance of the other person who should have been there. He knew there should be such a person, but in the world repaired by time, that person’s existence was not allowed.
Yi Chenliang clutched his phone, standing at the bustling crossroads, being swept up by the bustling crowd, he looked around blankly, not knowing where to go.
He had lost the other him.
He couldn’t find him.
Heaven and earth, countless people, he and the other him were separated by twenty years of time, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t touch him at all.
Fifteen-year-old him stood at this end of time, crying out, hoarse, trying hard to remember their unreserved conversations, desperate kisses, intimate tenderness in the night, but still being diluted by the irresistible tide of time, belonging only to their two memories.
He still had to wait twenty years to turn himself into another Yi Chenliang.
But when Yi Chenliang, twenty years later, turned his head to look back, he could no longer see the appearance of fifteen-year-old Yi Chenliang.
Fifteen-year-old Yi Chenliang couldn’t make himself grow up overnight, just like thirty-five-year-old Yi Chenliang couldn’t dissect a fifteen-year-old Yi Chenliang from his body. They were the same soul, formed over time, irreplicable, inseparable, naturally integrated.
Invisible, untouchable, the emptiness of powerlessness tore at him, intense pain and sadness entwined him, but could not find a place to land on his soul. His heart was as if someone had torn off half of it alive, the blurred flesh and blood hurt so much that he couldn’t even shed tears.
They were destined never to meet.