Past Trauma

The day I found out I had cancer.

He Wei frowned and said coldly to me, “Do you think anyone would be sad if you died? No one would feel bad about it.”

I said, “Whatever.”

Then I sincerely wished him, “I hope you’ll do as you say.”

After all, the year my brother died saving me, everyone looked at me and said:

“Why wasn’t it you who died?”

Later, I stood on the rooftop of the abandoned building where my brother passed away and jumped off.

But He Wei, why were you crying?

I met someone named Chen Ye.

Everyone says he is loyal, kind, and a rare good person in this world.

But I think he is vulgar, hypocritical, and the most despicable and shameless scoundrel in the world.

Yet I kind of like him.

I was the unloved young lady of the Marquis Mansion.

My father gave me to my elder sister’s fiancé and forced me to bear his child.

I was compelled to write a breakup letter to the man I loved.

“How could a Mountain Village Bumpkin ever be worthy of a lady of my station?”

Later, the bumpkin from that letter had risen to the highest ranks, and he mocked me with disdain,

“And you, an Abandoned Wife – how could you ever be worthy of me?”

I fell in love with a poor boy, but later broke up with him because he was poor.

Years later, he became successful and famous, while I, serving food, accidentally stained his girlfriend’s bag.

The young girlfriend sneered, “Do you recognize this bag? Can you afford to compensate for it?”

I smiled and handed her my own bag:

“A limited edition Birkin, three times the price of yours. Is it alright if I compensate you with this?”

At the premiere of the film “Huaian,” director Chen Huaixu said he had spent twelve years preparing for it-a belated promise to someone.

A reporter asked, “Someone very important, right?”

He joked self-deprecatingly, “A liar I’ll never forget.”

Later, my past was completely exposed, and netizens went crazy shipping our expired romance.

He held me, sobbing so hard he could barely speak:

“Qi An, I’ve saved up many millions by now. Would you consider me for a second marriage?”

When Nie Feng and I were about to file for divorce, he was in a car accident and lost his memory.

His memory was stuck eight years in the past.

Eight years ago, he loved me the most.

After my wife disappeared, I frantically searched everywhere for her. Following a trail of clues, I finally found the Monitor from high school.

The Monitor had once been the top student in our class, with excellent grades, a sunny disposition, and good looks-the kind of child every parent praised, who should have had a bright future. Yet now, in his forties, he had sunk to working at a nightclub in his hometown.

I paid a hefty sum to meet him, hoping to learn the truth.

But sometimes, when you part the mist and see the stars, it isn’t necessarily a good thing.

When I was a child, my father once gave me a ten-yuan bill as pocket money.

He said he had picked it up on the road.

I remember very clearly that on the back of that bill, written in black ink, was a line:

“There is a pyramid scheme on the fifth floor. Help.”

I took the money to show my father, and he smiled and told me,

“Who knows how many people have used this bill? Who knows when those words were written? Maybe the person who wrote them has already been rescued.”

I was in a hurry to buy chocolate, so I didn’t think much about it.

Because chocolate is sweet, after all.

Not long after, there was a piece of news on TV.

“A man mistakenly entered a pyramid scheme den, was beaten to death, and then dismembered.”

As a child, I stared blankly at the television.

My father also stared blankly at the television.

I asked him what was wrong.

He shouted at me angrily, telling me not to meddle in his business, and then left the house.

At the time, I didn’t know what was going on; I just felt confused.

It wasn’t until the New Year, at the family dinner, that my father got drunk and cried uncontrollably. In front of all the relatives, he confessed to picking up that bill.

The place where he found the money was directly below the den mentioned in the news.

In other words, the words on that ten-yuan bill were very likely written by someone who had fallen into that pyramid scheme, possibly even the person who was dismembered.

He sobbed, clutching a bottle of liquor, saying that it was his fault that the man died. The whole family comforted him, but I just stood aside, dumbfounded and at a loss.

So… I used that money to buy chocolate…

Something indescribable seemed to awaken within me.

Throughout my later life, I would often think of that ten-yuan bill.

I wondered, was the original owner of that money alright? Was he really rescued? Or… did that money really come from the man who was dismembered?

If it really came from him, he must have endured painful beatings and inhuman torture before finally seizing a chance one day to write those words for help on the bill and toss it out the window.

He must have clung to hope for rescue until the very moment he died.

Yet my father ignored that hope.

I always ask myself, if I had been the first to find that bill, could I have saved him? Or would I have overlooked the writing, just like my father?

This thought haunts me like a ghost, tormenting my mind more and more as I grow older.

Until that day.

A new “bill” appeared before me.

…

I was helping my childhood friend, who was hospitalized, to the bathroom, but at the door, I ran into my ex-boyfriend whom I hadn’t seen in five years.

He was half-embracing a pregnant woman, his head slightly lowered, their posture intimate.

I vaguely heard the pregnant woman call him “husband.”

After five years of separation, I had imagined countless scenarios of our reunion, but I never dared to think that he would already be married.

Five years after my boyfriend’s death, I met a man in an interview who looked exactly like him.

When work was over, I cornered him in the conference room: “Since you’re not dead, why haven’t you contacted me in these five years?”

He straightened his tie, his smile both flippant and distant: “This kind of pick-up line is a bit cliché, Miss Meng. Why not just offer yourself directly?”

I ignored him and reached out, touching a slight bump behind his ear.

He froze instantly.

I laughed: “What’s wrong? You look alike, and now even your sensitive spots are the same?”