I Promise to Walk With You for Half of my Life’s Journey - Chapter 25

The rainy season in the third year arrived with sudden intensity.

Half a month of continuous rain caused a large, dark water stain to seep into the already mottled wall of An Chuxin’s dormitory. The air was thick with the lingering scent of mold and damp earth.

Worse still, the faded scar on her right hand began to itch, redden, and ache in the high humidity and fluctuating temperatures. In the stillness of the night, the discomfort became particularly sharp, crawling along the lines of the scar and dragging her back to that chaotic night.

She shook her head, unscrewed a tube of ointment, and applied it haphazardly. The cool cream temporarily soothed the itch, but it could not suppress the ripples of memory in her heart.

This discomfort was eventually exposed during an afternoon of labor.

The school had received a donation of used desks and chairs that required manual transport and assembly. An Chuxin was carrying a desk across the playground with a few older boys when her foot slipped. She instinctively gripped the edge of the desk with her right hand to maintain her balance, and a sharp, stabbing pain shot through her scar. She gasped, her grip loosened, and the desk tilted, splashing mud all over her.

“Teacher An!” the children cried out, surrounding her.

She waved them off, insisting she was fine, but her pale face and cold sweat were telling. Zhaxi, the most observant of the group, grabbed her right hand before she could hide it behind her back. “Teacher, your hand is bleeding!”

A small, new crack had opened near the thumb where the old scar had been strained, and a few beads of blood surfaced. The children fell silent, their wide eyes fixed on the wound. An Chuxin tried to pull her hand away, but Zhaxi held on firmly, his dark, bright eyes filled with concern rather than fear. “Does it hurt?”

That simple question struck An Chuxin deeply. She remembered Cheng Sutong touching this very scar with trembling fingers, crying and asking, “Does it hurt?” For a fleeting moment, time and space seemed to overlap.

“A little,” she finally admitted, her voice steady. “Sometimes it hurts when the weather is bad or if I accidentally bump it.”

“Like Grandpa’s rheumatism legs!” Zhuoma whispered. “It hurts on rainy days.”

The analogy lightened the heavy atmosphere, and An Chuxin offered a wry smile. The children nodded, understanding as best they could.

The matter did not end there.

The next day during recess, Zhaxi ran to An Chuxin’s office and pulled a small wooden box from his robe. Inside was a dark, thick paste that smelled strongly of herbs. “My grandmother gave it to me,” he said proudly. “It treats wounds and helps with the ‘rainy day pain.’ It is very good! Grandmother said if I apply it and say a prayer for blessing, it will heal fast.”

An Chuxin looked at the herbal paste of unknown ingredients and then at Zhaxi’s expectant face. Her rational mind told her to use the iodine and antibiotic ointment she had brought, but her heart was moved by the child’s sincere care, which carried the mark of his culture.

She reached out and gently patted Zhaxi’s head. “Thank you, and thank your grandmother as well. But I must wash my hand first before applying the medicine, right?”

She took Zhaxi to the tap and carefully cleaned the wound. Under Zhaxi’s tense gaze, she used a bamboo splint to pick up a bit of the herbal paste and spread it evenly over the crack and the reddened scar. The paste felt coarse and warm, and it smelled pungent, but the itching pain truly seemed to subside.

“Now we pray!” Zhaxi closed his eyes seriously, pressed his palms together, and began to murmur in Tibetan. He stumbled over some of the words, but his expression was solemn.

The sunlight slanted through the window, illuminating the woman and the child. It shone on the black herbal paste covering the scar and on Zhaxi’s devout profile.

This small healing ritual somehow spread throughout the school. Over the following days, children began secretly giving her things: a dried leaf said to stop bleeding, a smooth pebble meant to act as a “painkiller stone,” and even a small packet of precious sugar. “Mama says if you eat sugar, your heart will be sweet, and the wound will not hurt,” one child explained.

An Chuxin did not reject any of these gestures. She kept them in a drawer alongside Zhaxi’s herbal paste. Whenever the scar bothered her, she still used her clinical ointment first, but she would think of the leaves, the stones, and the sugar, and remember the children’s caring eyes.

The first dormitory gathering of university students took place at a hotpot restaurant.

Red oil bubbled, beer foamed, and young faces glowed with excitement. Someone suggested a game of Truth or Dare. When it was Cheng Sutong’s turn, the question came from a slightly tipsy Lin Wei: “Cheng Sutong, do you have someone you like?”

The table erupted in cheers. Cheng Sutong held her water glass. She could have lied and said no, but she suddenly did not want to.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wow! Who is it? Someone from our school? An upperclassman or a freshman?” The questions came in a rapid fire.

Cheng Sutong looked up, her gaze scanning the curious faces. Her vision seemed to pierce through the steam of the hotpot restaurant to a distant place—a simple classroom in a small western county where a woman might be grading homework with postcards from different years sitting by her hand.

“Not from school,” she replied.

“Then who? How did you meet?” the follow-up came quickly.

Cheng Sutong was silent for a few seconds. Then, she did something that surprised everyone. She gently pulled the silver chain from beneath her collar and cradled the plain ring in her palm.

“We met,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “during the worst time of my life. She gave me a second life and then gave me six years of freedom to let me decide if I wanted to go back to her.”

The table fell silent. This answer was far beyond the scope of a campus romance; it carried a weight of gravity.

Lin Wei asked cautiously, “So, what about you two now?”

“Waiting for an agreed-upon time.” Cheng Sutong tucked the ring back inside her collar.

After a subtle silence, someone tried to liven up the atmosphere. “Wow, that is so romantic! Like a movie!”

Cheng Sutong smiled but did not explain. She knew they would not understand. To these eighteen and nineteen-year-old classmates, love was an instant spark, walking side by side on campus, or making an official announcement on social media. Between her and An Chuxin, it was a commitment of life and death, a wait measured in years, and a resolute decision to run toward each other despite the difficult path ahead.

As the night ended and Lin Wei walked her back to the dormitory, the night wind felt cool.

“Tongtong,” Lin Wei began hesitantly, “is that person much older than you?”

“Yes.”

“Then do you think it is more about gratitude? After all, she saved you.”

Lin Wei asked carefully, showing genuine concern as a friend. Cheng Sutong stopped and looked at the insects fluttering under the streetlamp.

“Lin Wei, have you ever seen someone who was about to freeze to death?” she suddenly asked.

“What? No.”

Cheng Sutong’s voice was very soft. “I have. I did not see it in someone else; I saw it in myself. Heart failure feels like being thrown into an ice cellar. Darkness rushes at you from all directions, and you desperately try to grab onto something, but there is nothing there.”

“If someone just gave you a coat then, you would be grateful to them for the rest of your life. But this person jumped in and held me. She used her own body heat to warm me back up, inch by inch. When I was finally warm enough to stand on my own, she let go and stepped back onto the shore. She told me that there were warmer places ahead and that I should walk there myself. She said if I walked around and still felt that her place was the warmest, I should come back.”

The night wind moved the hair on her forehead as she looked at Lin Wei.

“Gratitude? Gratitude is too light a word. It is a faith. It is the only faith you are willing to protect for the rest of your life after seeing absolute cold and darkness.”

Lin Wei opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. She simply gave her a tight hug.

That night, Cheng Sutong wrote in her diary: “They asked me if it was gratitude. I cannot explain it. When love is this deep, gratitude is the least important part. What matters is that when the world collapsed into ruins before me, she was the one who knelt down with me, patiently picking up the pieces one by one, believing that we could piece together a new map.”

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