Lin Zhou placed the last book back on the shelf, her fingertips brushing across the gold-stamped title of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The "Isle of Light Bookstore" where she worked was tucked away in a quiet corner of the city, an island in the torrent of time, offering refuge to all sorts of lonely souls. And she, perhaps, was its most loyal inhabitant.
After turning off the last light in the shop, a gust of early autumn wind greeted her. Lin Zhou wrapped her trench coat tighter and started for home. Her apartment was on the fifth floor of an old building on an old street, with no elevator. Climbing those five floors every day was one of the few forms of "exercise" in her life.
The key slid into the lock, turned, and the door creaked open. As always, she was met with a cold, dark room. She was used to it. For three years, ever since Shen Che had left for the other side of the world, no light had ever been left on for her.
She changed her shoes, flicked on the lights, and placed a sandwich from the convenience store into the fridge. The routine was so practiced it was heartbreaking. Just as she was about to boil water for a shower, a dull thud sounded from the ceiling, followed by a series of suppressed coughs, so violent it sounded as if the person was trying to cough up a lung.
There it was again.
Lin Zhou looked up at the ceiling and sighed helplessly. The resident upstairs had moved in six months ago. She had never seen his face, only knowing him as a man with a chaotic schedule who made a fair bit of noise. He would create all sorts of sounds late at night—sometimes a heavy object dropping, other times the unidentifiable sound of something being dragged, but most often, it was this sickly coughing. In her mind, she had given him a nickname: "Mr. Ghost."
A ghost, haunting the space above her, reminding her with his noise that in this building, there was another soul, just like her, awake and lonely in the dead of night. She shook her head, trying to dismiss the absurd thought, and walked into the bathroom. In the hot, billowing steam, she thought of Shen Che. What was he doing right now? Was he pulling an all-nighter in a lab for some project? It should be daytime where he was.
Over the past three years, she had etched the twelve-hour time difference into her very bones.
The coughing continued intermittently, a broken lullaby that accompanied her to sleep. In her dreams, she was back at the airport, three years ago.