I Promise to Walk With You for Half of my Life’s Journey - Chapter 23

After bumping along a winding mountain road for six hours, the bus came to a halt on a dusty, open plot of land. An Chuxin stepped off the vehicle carrying two suitcases, choking on the scent of dry yellow earth.

What lay before her was the so-called “Town Center Primary School.” It consisted of three rows of low brick buildings and a perimeter wall that had collapsed at one corner, revealing a barren dirt playground. The only vibrant thing in sight was the faded yet still fluttering national flag atop its pole.

The principal was a middle-aged man with dark skin and deep wrinkles. When he shook her hand, his palm felt as rough as sandpaper. “Teacher An, it has been a long trip. We have prepared a dormitory for you, though the conditions are limited.”

The dormitory was an old classroom that had been cleared out. It was about ten square meters, and the green paint on the lower half of the walls had peeled away to reveal the yellow earth beneath. There was a single iron bunk bed, a wobbly desk, and a washbasin stand. A crack in the window glass had been patched with yellowing adhesive tape. There was no running water; instead, a semi-old water vat and a wooden ladle sat by the door.

“The restroom is on the far side of the playground. It is an outhouse. If you go at night, it is best to go with someone and bring a flashlight,” the principal said, pointing toward a low shed in the distance. “The cafeteria opens at seven o’clock. If you are late, you miss it. You should rest for today.”

Once the door closed, there was only the wailing of the mountain wind through the window gap and the occasional, unintelligible shout from the distance.

She walked to the window. This place was separated from her familiar city and from Cheng Sutong by more than just a thousand kilometers; it was separated by a primitive texture of survival.

She took a small sealed bag from her inner pocket. Inside was the white wildflower, long dried and fragile. She remembered the wind on the day of their departure at Qingwu Mountain, the slight trembling of Cheng Sutong’s fingers as she pinned it to her backpack strap, and the promise, “The coordinates for the first year: Qingwu Mountain, beside the white wildflower.” Memories rushed back with a damp intensity that felt entirely out of place in this parched land.

She tucked the sealed bag under her pillow.

She barely slept during her first night. The discomfort of the hard wooden bed, the strange noises of night birds, the wind, and the barking of wild dogs kept her awake. Even her dinner—cornmeal buns and a watery dish of potatoes and cabbage—was difficult to digest. Everything reminded her that she would have to learn to adapt to this place from scratch.

At dawn, she sat up and wrote the first line in her diary by the moonlight.

“November 3rd. Clear. It is very dry here. The dust seems to swallow all sound, including my own.”

An Chuxin was assigned to teach mathematics and art for the entire school. There was no multimedia equipment in the classroom, the blackboard was pitted and uneven, and the chalk often snapped. The children’s eyes held curiosity, fear, and a numbness born from witnessing the hardships of life too early.

She tried to implement the methods she used in the city: group discussions, poetry recitations, and encouraging them to draw their dreams. Most of the responses were silence and confusion. Under her encouragement, a girl named Zhuoma drew a picture of “My Home.” It featured a crooked house with tiny parents standing at the door under a dark gray sky. When An Chuxin tried to praise her for her bold use of color, Zhuoma lowered her head and spoke in broken Mandarin. “Teacher, my home has no color. The mountains are gray, the sky is gray, and our clothes are gray too.”

Her advanced educational philosophies had collided with reality for the first time.

The physical discomfort was even more tangible. The dry climate caused her lips to crack, and the limited diet led to mild stomach pains. What unsettled her most was the loneliness. The local teachers were polite but distant, returning to their own homes after work and leaving her with the boundless silence of the empty campus.

She began to combat this silence with manual labor. She volunteered to carry water, helped the cafeteria staff chop firewood, and even learned how to repair broken desks and chairs. Wood splinters pierced her fingers, and blisters broke to form new calluses. She did these things as if physical exhaustion could offset the emptiness in her heart.

A student named Yangzong had not come to school for three consecutive days. Word was that her family would no longer let her attend. An Chuxin walked for two hours along mountain paths to find their home, which consisted of only three earth-walled rooms. Yangzong’s father crouched at the door smoking a self-rolled cigarette while her mother fed the pigs, reacting with indifference to An Chuxin’s arrival.

“She is a girl; knowing a few characters is enough. There is too much work at home, and her brother is still young,” the father said, leaving no room for negotiation.

An Chuxin tried to reason with him, speaking of how knowledge could change destiny and how intelligent Yangzong was. Her words were met with long silence and the sight of Yangzong hiding behind the door, her eyes full of tears she did not dare let fall.

On the walk back, a cold rain began to fall. She had no umbrella and was soaked to the bone, her shoes caked in mud. Rain mixed with tears as they flowed down her face, and she could not tell which was which. She remembered telling Cheng Sutong, “All I can do is stay with you until you find your own reason to live.”

But what about now? She did not even have the power to bring one girl back to the classroom. Her ideas about education and the future felt pale and ridiculous in the face of this barren reality. She could not save Yangzong, just as she might not have truly saved Cheng Sutong back then. This thought shattered the unconscious “savior” complex she had carried at the start of her service.

That night, she developed a low fever. Curling up in her cold blankets, she took out the first postcard Cheng Sutong had sent her. It featured a drawing of a ginkgo leaf with a message written in calm handwriting: “Observations: Falling leaves are like fragments of time, and I am learning to piece myself together.”

Watching those words, An Chuxin suddenly realized something. In a distant city, Cheng Sutong was learning to piece together a self that had been shattered by illness and time travel. Meanwhile, here, An Chuxin was having her own unrealistic illusions and pride shattered by the land, learning to use this very soil to rebuild a harder, stronger version of herself.

She wrote in her diary:

“November 24th. Rain. I walked two hours on mountain paths and failed to bring back a student. The rain is very cold. I have discovered that many of the things I brought with me are useless here, whether it is my teaching methods or my self-righteous help. Perhaps the first thing I need to learn is not how to give, but how to empty myself.”

The Second Year: Autumn

This time, Cheng Sutong had been admitted to a different university than in her previous life, though fortunately, her major was roughly the same, making the coursework familiar.

Standing before the school gates, the “freshman” Cheng Sutong looked up at the gold-lettered sign. What surged in her chest was not anticipation, but a deep sense of exhaustion.

An enthusiastic upperclassman came over to help with her luggage. “Hey there! The freshman registration desk is this way. I can show you.”

“Okay, thank you,” she replied.

It was a loneliness born of a “god’s-eye view.” She was like an actor returning to the stage with a script she already knew by heart, forced to perform the freshness of a first encounter while her heart had already lived through a lifetime.

That night, she drew a door on the first page of her sketchbook. Outside the door was the clamor of the freshman crowd; inside was a tiny figure standing alone with its back to the viewer.

She wrote underneath: “Day 1. I am at university again. This time, it is not for a degree, but to live long enough to stand before you.”

The professional courses were far too simple for her. The formulas and theories that left her classmates scratching their heads were things she had mastered in her previous life to distract herself from pain. However, she could not let that show. Her challenge was not learning, but rather learning how to appear as though she were learning at a reasonable pace.

She intentionally left mistakes in her assignments that would be expected of a “bright freshman” and asked questions in class that hit exactly the right key points. This performance of self-limitation gave her a strange sense of detachment. The only thing she devoted herself to fully was art and creation, as this was a field she had missed out on due to being bedridden in her past life. Before a canvas, she was a true explorer.

Cheng Sutong’s dormitory was a standard four-person room. The other three girls were vivid, genuine eighteen-year-olds. Lin Wei was lively and dreamed of being a war correspondent; Zhao Xiaoyu was introverted and had a crush on the basketball captain from the next class; Zhou Wen was a realist already preparing for the civil service exam.

To Cheng Sutong, the dormitory was like a small observation room for the human race.

During a late-night chat after the lights were out, Zhao Xiaoyu held up her phone for the nth time, the screen illuminating her anxious face. “Tongtong, do you think I should send him a message? I think he looked at me during gym class today.”

Lin Wei rolled over in her top bunk. “Send it! The worst he can do is reject you. Youth is about being brave!”

Zhou Wen’s calm voice came from the opposite bed. “Check his social media first. Analyze his interests and find a common topic before you make a move.”

Cheng Sutong lay in the bottom bunk by the window, rubbing the ring on her chest. The silver felt cool in the dark as she thought of An Chuxin. If An Chuxin were eighteen, would she toss and turn over such small things? Probably not. That woman seemed to be born carrying more weight than others; love was a luxury for her, not a necessity.

“Tongtong, what do you think?” Zhao Xiaoyu tossed the question to her.

Cheng Sutong was silent for two seconds. Her twenty-three-year-old soul wanted to say that this excitement would fade in three months and she wouldn’t even remember his face. But eighteen-year-old Zhao Xiaoyu needed encouragement, not the truth.

“If you want to send it, then do it. But don’t just ask ‘What are you doing?’ Share something interesting from your day instead. For example,” she thought for a moment, “like that stray cat that wandered into the classroom.”

“Oh, right!” Zhao Xiaoyu got excited. “I took a picture of it today!”

For ten minutes after the message was sent, the entire dormitory fell into a suspenseful silence. Cheng Sutong found the scene both familiar and strange. In her past life, she had waited for test results in the hospital in much the same way. The only difference was that back then, she was waiting for a verdict on life or death, whereas now, they were waiting to see if a boy would reply.

The phone vibrated. Zhao Xiaoyu shrieked, “He replied! He replied! He said he saw the cat too!”

A small cheer erupted in the dormitory. Cheng Sutong curled her lips into a smile in the darkness. She suddenly realized that for Zhao Xiaoyu, the weight of this one reply was no less than the weight of a stable ECG report in her past life. The joys and sorrows of youth are not always universal, but they are always profound.

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