I Promise to Walk With You for Half of my Life’s Journey - Chapter 19

It was the day of the surgery.

Her phone vibrated with a message from the caregiver: “Miss An, the surgery starts at seven o’clock tomorrow. You need to be here before six-thirty.”

An Chuxin replied, “Okay.”

The surgery lasted for seven hours.

Sitting in the waiting area, An Chuxin stared at the red “Surgery in Progress” light on the wall, feeling like a prisoner awaiting a verdict. Time stretched infinitely; every second felt as long as a century. She did not dare think about the possibility of the surgery failing. That thought was like an abyss; just a glance at the edge was enough to leave her feeling chilled to the bone.

Her phone screen remained lit, staying on her chat window with Cheng Sutong. Suddenly, she felt a desperate urge to send Cheng Sutong a message. She wanted to tell her that the surgery had started, that she was scared, and so many other things.

But she could not.

She remembered the look in Cheng Sutong’s eyes. She could not give her hope only to crush it with her own hands; that would be too cruel.

The red light went out, and the operating room doors opened. An Chuxin stood up abruptly, her vision momentarily blacking out from the sudden movement. She leaned against the wall to steady herself, then hurried toward the doctor.

“Teacher An, we did our best.”

Time stood still at that moment.

Outside the window, the sun had not yet risen; it was the deepest darkness before dawn. An Chuxin walked over slowly and knelt by the bed, taking her mother’s hand. That hand bore the calluses of years of labor, the needle marks from IV drips, and the wrinkles etched by time.

“Mom, didn’t you say you wanted to see me get married?”

There was no answer.

“Didn’t you say you would wait for me to bring the person I love home for you to meet?”

Tears finally fell, splashing onto the back of her mother’s hand.

“How can you go back on your word?”

She lowered her head, burying her face in her mother’s palm as her shoulders shook violently. The caregiver, eyes red, walked over and tried to help her up. An Chuxin shook her head and waved the hand away.

She knelt by her mother’s bed for a long time, until the nurses had to come in to handle the body. She watched as her mother was covered with a white sheet, watched the face she had looked at for twenty-eight years disappear beneath the pure white fabric, and watched her last relative in this world be wheeled toward a place from which no one returns.

When she finally stood up, her legs were numb from kneeling so long. She stumbled and had to grab the wall to keep from falling. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She took it out to find a text from the hospital reminding her to pay for follow-up treatment costs. The system did not know yet that the patient no longer required treatment.

She stared at the message, suddenly finding it absurdly laughable. Money, the thing she had fought so hard to earn, was useless now.

The funeral arrangements were simple and rushed. There was no wake and no memorial service; only a few distant relatives and school colleagues sent wreaths. An Chuxin buried her mother’s ashes in the cemetery. Truthfully, she had not yet fully woken up to the reality that her mother was gone.

On the afternoon she finished all the paperwork, she returned to an empty home. Her mother’s room remained exactly as it was: the bed was tidy, unfinished medicine sat on the table, and the pothos plant on the windowsill had leaves turning yellow from several days without water.

An Chuxin stood at the doorway for a long time. Then, she walked in, sat on her mother’s bed, and picked up the photo frame from the nightstand. The photo showed her mother in her youth, holding her as an infant and smiling warmly. Back then, her father was still around, and though they were not wealthy, the house was full of laughter.

“Mom,” she whispered, “what should I do?”

The photo offered no answer, but her mother’s final words echoed in her ears: “Xiaoxin, if you meet the right person, do not let yourself have regrets.”

Regrets.

An Chuxin remembered the sight of her own back as she turned away from Cheng Sutong. She remembered saying in the café, “I love you, but I cannot love you.” She thought about how, over these past few months, she had pushed Cheng Sutong away time and again out of fear of losing her job or hurting her. But was the greatest hurt of all not clearly loving someone, yet pretending not to?

After that farewell in the café, Cheng Sutong thought she could get back on track as An Chuxin wished, waiting for graduation and then heading toward a future that did not include her. But she could not do it.

Every time the night grew still and she remembered those tearful eyes saying, “I love you, but I cannot love you,” or every time her heart flared with that familiar pain and she thought of the cold ending on July 3, 2024, she felt herself breaking apart bit by bit. Worse still, her physical condition was deteriorating rapidly.

The frequency of her heart palpitations increased from two or three times a week to almost once a day. Insomnia became total sleeplessness. Her homeroom teacher noticed her abnormality and tactfully suggested she take a leave of absence to rest. Cheng Sutong refused because she did not dare stop. Once she stopped, the suppressed fear and despair would overwhelm her like a tide.

This continued until one evening in early July.

Cheng Sutong was walking near the school. As she reached the gate, a brilliant sunset was burning across the horizon. An orange-red glow stained half the sky, beautiful like a grand, tender farewell. Cheng Sutong stopped to look at the light and suddenly felt a bout of intense dizziness. The world spun before her eyes, and colors blended into a blurred patch of light. She leaned against the wall by the gate and gasped for air, but oxygen could not seem to reach her lungs, and a tearing pain ripped through her chest.

This episode was more severe than any before.

She slid down the wall into a sitting position, her hand pressed tightly over her heart as cold sweat instantly soaked her clothes. Her vision began to blur, and a sharp ringing filled her ears. It was the sound of the monitors in the 2024 hospital room, the echo of her life’s countdown.

“I am going to die.”

The thought surfaced clearly in her mind. It would happen right here, in the summer of 2018, without An Chuxin ever knowing. Even stronger than the fear was a massive sense of regret. She had not told An Chuxin the truth yet. She had not told her who she was, where she came from, or why she had to endure all of this. That secret would die with her.

Just before her consciousness sank into darkness, a figure rushed toward her.

“Cheng Sutong!”

It was An Chuxin’s voice, which was urgent, panicked, and filled with a terror Cheng Sutong had never heard before. Cheng Sutong struggled to lift her head, identifying that face through her blurred vision.

“Medicine! Medicine!” An Chuxin knelt down, fumbling frantically through her pockets. “Where is your medicine?”

“It is gone,” Cheng Sutong said with the last of her strength. “The 2023 medicine is all gone.”

An Chuxin’s hand froze, but she had no time to ask questions. She scooped Cheng Sutong up, just like she had on that field trip day, and ran with all her might toward her car parked by the road.

“Hang on,” she said over and over, her voice trembling. “Tongtong, look at me. Hang on.”

Sutong leaned into her embrace, listening to her racing heartbeat and feeling the jolts as she ran. The night wind whistled past her ears, carrying away her last bit of consciousness. Before fading completely into the dark, she whispered, “An Chuxin, I am sorry. There is something I have not told you.”

When Cheng Sutong woke up, she found herself lying in a familiar hospital bed. What was different was the person sitting beside it.

An Chuxin was not sitting with a straight back like last time. She was slumped over the bed with her face buried in her arms, her shoulders rising and falling slightly. Night had completely fallen outside, and only a small nightlight was on in the room. The dim yellow light cast over her made her look unusually fragile.

Cheng Sutong moved her finger. An Chuxin looked up; her eyes were red and swollen with tear streaks still drying on her face. Seeing Cheng Sutong awake, she visibly relaxed, though her brow remained furrowed.

“You are awake,” she said hoarsely. “How do you feel?”

“I am okay.”

An Chuxin stood up to pour a glass of warm water, inserted a straw, and held it to her lips. Cheng Sutong took small sips. After she finished, An Chuxin sat down again, looking at her with a complex expression.

“The doctor said,” she began slowly, “that your condition is very bad. Your heart function is continuing to decline, and you have severe malnutrition. Last time you said the 2023 medicine was all gone. What did you mean by that?”

Silence fell over the room, save for the rhythmic beeping of the monitor, which sounded like the ticking of a countdown clock. Cheng Sutong closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She could not take this secret to the grave. Even if An Chuxin did not believe her, or even if she thought she was crazy, she had to say it.

“Teacher An,” she opened her eyes and looked at An Chuxin, “if I told you that I am not seventeen, would you believe me?”

An Chuxin was stunned.

“My real age is twenty-three,” Cheng Sutong continued. “I come from the year 2024. In that timeline, I was lying on a hospital bed waiting to die because of late-stage congenital heart disease. Then, for some reason, I returned to 2018, back into my seventeen-year-old body.”

She paused to observe An Chuxin’s reaction. An Chuxin’s expression froze. She stared at Cheng Sutong with wide eyes as shock, skepticism, and confusion intertwined on her face.

“I know it sounds absurd,” Cheng Sutong said with a bitter smile. “Sometimes I think it is absurd myself. Why me? Why now? I cannot find the answers. I only know that I brought the memories and the illness of a twenty-three-year-old back into this seventeen-year-old body.”

She raised her hand, looking at her pale, slender fingers.

“This body looks young, but the heart inside is still that broken heart. I know exactly when it will fail completely: July 3, 2024. In the original timeline, that was the day I died.”

At this point, her voice began to tremble.

“When you asked me why I always seemed so exhausted and so hopeless, I am now giving you the answer. It is because I am counting down every day. Every palpitation and every pain is a reminder that I am one day closer to that ending.”

Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, soaking into the pillow.

“I wanted to live a good life too, An Chuxin. I wanted to listen to you, take my medicine on time, eat well, and get into a good university, but I could not. Because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, that ending was waiting for me. Like a movie with a pre-written ending, I am just forced to watch it again.”

She broke into a sob, the fear and despair she had suppressed for months finally exploding.

“I am sorry for keeping it from you.”

An Chuxin remained immersed in massive shock, motionless. Cheng Sutong shook all over from crying, like a leaf fluttering in a storm. She thought she would be questioned, denied, or even sent to a psychiatric ward; she had rehearsed these possibilities countless times.

But she did not expect An Chuxin’s next reaction. After a long silence, An Chuxin suddenly stood up and walked to the window. Cheng Sutong watched her stiff back, her heart sinking inch by inch. She thought An Chuxin did not believe her.

Just as she was about to give up, An Chuxin spoke.

“So that is why your eyes were always so complex when you looked at me. That is why you were so familiar with knowledge beyond your age. That is why you chose Being and Time in the library. That rainy night, when you said you could not stand me being talked about like that, it was not because you were afraid of rumors. It was because you had experienced a deeper loneliness. You knew what it felt like to be isolated, did you not?”

Cheng Sutong was dazed; she had not expected An Chuxin to understand from that perspective.

“You were so skilled when you helped me organize medical documents because, in the future, you had already handled all of this, had you not?”

An Chuxin walked back to the bed step by step and sat in the chair, her eyes fixed on Cheng Sutong.

“And that medicine blister pack. I checked the 2023 production date. That batch is indeed a new drug that will not hit the market for another six years. At the time, I thought you got it through some special channel, but I did not dare think too deeply about it. And that song you listened to with me, Your Arrival. I could not find that song then, and I thought you wrote it. It turns out you had already heard it when you were twenty. You handle complex problems better than your peers because you have lived through them and endured them, right?”

She reached out and gently took Cheng Sutong’s hand.

“Tell me,” An Chuxin said, her voice carrying a tremor Cheng Sutong had never heard before, “in your original timeline, did you know me?”

Tears welled up again as Cheng Sutong shook her head.

“No. In my memory, the eleventh-grade homeroom teacher was a man named Mr. Zhao. An Chuxin, the name and the person in this world, is someone I only met after I arrived here.”

An Chuxin’s eyes widened, and her grip on Cheng Sutong’s hand tightened.

“You mean that in your past, I did not exist at all?”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

“I do not know either,” Cheng Sutong said through tears. “Maybe this world is different from my original one. Maybe you are the only variable after I arrived here.”

Those words sliced through the fog. An Chuxin froze completely. She looked at Cheng Sutong, at this woman who was twenty-three years old and burdened with a death countdown. She made a gesture that Cheng Sutong would never forget. She leaned down and gently pulled Cheng Sutong into an embrace. It was not the hug of a teacher to a student, but an unreserved embrace from one person to another.

“Silly child,” An Chuxin’s voice sounded in her ear, thick with emotion. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Cheng Sutong wailed in her arms. “I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what? That I would not believe you?” An Chuxin gently patted her back. “I believe you. Tongtong, I believe you.”

Those few words were like warm sunshine, shining into Cheng Sutong’s long-frozen heart.

“But,” she sobbed, “I only have six years to live, maybe less.”

“Then change it,” An Chuxin interrupted. “Since this world and I are variables, let us change everything.”

She pulled back from the hug and cupped Cheng Sutong’s face in her hands, forcing her to look into her eyes. Those eyes, usually calm and self-contained, were now burning with a fire of determination, anger, and a stubborn refusal to bow to fate.

“Listen, Cheng Sutong,” An Chuxin said word by word. “I will not let you repeat the same mistakes. I will not let you lie on a hospital bed waiting for death alone. I will not let you go through that despair again.”

Tears fell from her eyes, but she did not wipe them away.

“You have me. We will fight this disease together; we will change that ending together. If medicine cannot save you, we will find another way. If we do not have enough money, I will earn more. You ask if I believe you traveled through time? I do. And I am telling you, I also believe that love can travel through time, can change fate, and can create miracles.”

Cheng Sutong could not stop her tears. She wanted to speak, to say that it was not fair or that An Chuxin did not have to do this, but An Chuxin’s gaze sealed off all her words of retreat.

“Cheng Sutong, twenty-three years old.” An Chuxin suddenly smiled, a smile touched with tears. “I am very glad to meet the real you. It is a bit late, but not too late. Now, get some rest.”

She stood up and tucked the covers around Cheng Sutong.

Support