Nous, après ces années-là

Us, Years Later

A rewritten short story on a theme · not an excerpt from an original work · 18+

The characters and plot in this piece are newly created. Everyone involved in the romance is a fictional adult over twenty-five, and none of them are related.

Chapter One: The Photo Missing One Person

The old photographs lived in a biscuit tin whose lid showed a red bird, half its color worn away. When Gu Ming set it on the dining table, Liang Xia was drying glasses. She was thirty-five this year, and she had borrowed a friend’s café for this small gathering. The people she had invited were old classmates who still kept in touch now and then after graduation.

What everyone brought was a jumble: a bag of roasted chestnuts no one had found time to heat, half a bottle of fruit wine nobody had ever liked, and an address book from ten years ago. Phones had scattered people into many little group chats, but the numbers on paper were still neat and complete. Not one of them had fallen behind.

Liang Xia spread out the first stack of photos and recognized the minibus they had rented the year they went to the sea. She stood at the far right of the frame, holding an umbrella she had never opened. On the left, a space had been left empty. Before the photographer counted down, she had asked a friend to keep it clear on purpose.

“Someone’s missing from this one,” a voice said.

Gu Ming set his glass down. Liang Xia did not need to look up to know who that someone was.

That trip had been their first long holiday after they started working. Gu Ming had promised to meet them at the station and never showed. They called. The calls did not go through. Not until evening did he post in the group: “Something came up. Have fun.”

By then, she and Gu Ming had liked each other for a while. No one had formally said they were together, but at every gathering their friends left the seats beside them open. She had thought this trip would be a clear beginning. She had even bought two music-festival tickets and tucked them into her itinerary notebook.

After he failed to come, it was as if someone had quietly moved them apart. Little by little, they stopped sitting together. Later Gu Ming went south for work, and Liang Xia stayed in the city. Now and then they talked about the weather in the group chat, and both of them could pick up the thread naturally. They simply no longer asked each other, alone, “How was your day?”

Now that blank space was back on the table. Liang Xia pushed the photo a little closer and said, “I used to think that if someone already knew, they didn’t need an explanation.”

No one followed it with a joke. A light rain began outside the window. The coffee machine let out a burst of steam.

Chapter Two: Morning Outside the Station

Their friends, considerate, changed the subject. Someone went to heat the chestnuts. Someone suggested finding a projector for the old videos. Gu Ming stayed at the table and helped Liang Xia sort the photos by year.

“How long did you wait that day?” he asked.

“Forty minutes. In the end it was Old Zhao who said if we didn’t leave, the driver would charge extra.”

Gu Ming nodded. He did not brush those forty minutes aside. He said that early that morning his father had suddenly collapsed at home. An ambulance took him to the hospital, and Gu Ming went with him. His father turned out not to be in serious danger, but he stayed two weeks. Tests and bills came down one after another and caught the family unprepared.

“I could have sent a message,” he said. “I had my phone. It had battery. It wasn’t that I had no chance.”

Liang Xia looked up at him. She had expected him to offer a string of things he could not help, and in the end turn the broken promise into an accident no one ought to blame.

“But I didn’t want anyone to know,” Gu Ming said. “Everyone was still in the dark about my dad losing his job. I was afraid that if I said he was in the hospital, nothing after that could stay hidden. Back then, letting people see that I wasn’t doing well felt harder than letting them think I was rude.”

He had sat on a plastic chair outside the emergency room, watching messages arrive one after another in the group chat, hoping someone would come help and afraid someone really would press him. In the end he used those four words—“something came up”—and kept everyone outside.

Liang Xia remembered that after the trip she had sent him a photo of the sea with no words attached. He replied, “Looks good.” At the time she took it for brush-off and did not keep talking.

“I didn’t ask you outright either,” she said. “I was angry. I just wanted to wait until you figured it out.”

Gu Ming looked at the photo in his hands. “You had reason to be angry.”

The words stung her nose. It was not because she had finally won some late victory. It was because, for years, she had been defending the person she was then: unwilling to look as if she cared too much, and unwilling to admit she had been hurt.

She asked how his father was now. Gu Ming said he had recovered well and had lately become obsessed with growing chili peppers. The balcony was so full there was nowhere left to hang laundry.

Liang Xia laughed, and a tear fell onto the rim of her glass. She wiped it with a napkin. Gu Ming did not hurry her to go on.

Chapter Three: Ten Years That Cannot Be Filled In

The projector was finally connected. A blurry video appeared on the wall. Their younger selves were singing at a barbecue stall. The subtitles had been made that year by Xu Zhe, full of typos, and somehow never corrected.

Everyone laughed until they rocked in their chairs. Liang Xia looked at the girl on the screen with her hair in a high ponytail and found her a little unfamiliar. She no longer went silent the moment she was angry, the way she had then, and she no longer believed that if two people liked each other they could be counted on to understand everything for each other.

In those ten years she had been married once. It ended two years ago. The parting was not dramatic. After trying again and again, they simply admitted they wanted different lives. Gu Ming knew about it and had not asked for details. She was grateful for his sense of measure, and she knew that gratitude was not the same thing as the flutter she had felt when she was young.

The video reached the stretch by the sea. The picture shook badly. Someone suggested taking a new photo, putting Gu Ming in it, and standing in the same places.

Liang Xia shook her head. “Leave the old photo as it is.”

She did not mean it as blame. That blank space had existed. Explaining it clearly today did not let them pretend it had never happened. She did not want their friends, for the sake of a complete story, to recut the roads each of them had actually walked.

Gu Ming said there was no need to fill it in either. So they changed tables and left the chestnuts, the glasses, and the chipped biscuit tin in the frame. In the new photo someone had their eyes closed, someone happened to be looking down, and Xu Zhe held the remote with his arm covering half his face.

“We’re not reshooting?” Old Zhao asked.

“This is enough,” Liang Xia said. “This is today.”

After the meal, friends left one by one. Someone had a high-speed train to catch, someone had to go home and take over caring for a child, and someone was on duty the next day. The gathering did not drag on until the last subway, the way it used to when they were young. People had begun to watch the time in earnest, and they had begun to understand that leaving on time did not mean they failed to treasure being together.

Gu Ming stayed to help her clean up. A chestnut had rolled under the table. He crouched to pick it up, and his back gave a small crack.

“I used to carry whole cases of beer and feel nothing,” he said.

“Now you know what a warm-up is.”

They laughed and moved the table back where it belonged. Gu Ming asked whether she wanted to keep the seaside photo. She said she would scan a copy first and put the original back in the tin, so no one would fail to find it later.

Chapter Four: One Specific Invitation

After the rain stopped, Liang Xia walked Gu Ming to the subway station. He said that this time he was back in the city until the end of the month. The company was opening a new office here, but he had not yet decided whether he would stay for the long term.

“You don’t have to decide to stay because I’m here,” Liang Xia said, and then laughed at herself. “There I go, thinking too much for you again.”

Gu Ming stood at the station entrance and did not rush to answer. He said he had thought about her, yes, but work, his parents, and his life each had to be counted separately. A person could be part of a decision. A person could not take responsibility for the other parts.

It was not a particularly lovely thing to say, and it put Liang Xia at ease. She no longer needed someone, in order to prove they liked her, to place the whole arrangement of a life in her hands at once.

“Next Saturday there’s a talk at the bookstore by the river on restoring old photographs,” she said. “I’m planning to go. It starts at two. Would you like to come with me?”

It was not “we’ll make plans when we’re free,” and it was not sending a link and waiting for him to take the hint. The time, the place, and the invitation were all here. He could accept. He could refuse.

Gu Ming opened his calendar. “Saturday morning I have to take my dad for a follow-up. It usually ends at noon, but I don’t know if we’ll have to wait a long time.”

“Then tell me when you know. I can go in and start listening. You can come later.”

“And if I can’t make it?”

“Then say you can’t make it. Don’t leave me guessing at the door.”

He nodded and saved the talk in his calendar. Liang Xia did not press him again about whether he had really remembered. Trust was not the result of checking someone else’s phone, and it did not return automatically to ten years ago because one question had finally been explained. It needed a next time, and a time after that, built slowly on ordinary days.

The sound of a train entering the station rose from underground. Gu Ming said goodbye, walked a few steps, then turned back and handed her a folded photograph from his pocket.

It was the new group photo, printed after the scan just now. He had made an extra copy. His fingers rested exactly along the bottom edge. He had not deliberately left a place for anyone.

Chapter Five: Fifteen Minutes Late

At 12:20 on Saturday, Liang Xia received a message: The checkup isn’t finished. I’ll probably be about half an hour late. Go in first.

She replied that she had it, then left according to her own plan. At the bookstore she bought a cup of tea and sat in the third row, on the aisle. She did not set a bag on the seat beside her to save it. When Gu Ming arrived they might not be able to sit together. That did not stop the two of them from coming to hear the same talk.

Fifteen minutes after it began, he came in through the side door and sat in the last row. Liang Xia turned, saw him lift the ticket in his hand, and put her attention back on the lectern.

The teacher was explaining the principles of restoring old photographs. Stains could be cleaned. Fading could be adjusted. But you could not, just to make the picture prettier, invent a smile and put it on someone’s face. Some scratches belonged to the way a photo had been kept. Some absences belonged to the life of that time. Restoration was for letting people see clearly. It was not for rewriting the ending of the past.

Liang Xia looked down and wrote the gist of the sentence in her notebook. She did not send it to Gu Ming, and she did not use it to hint at anything. She only thought it would be useful later, when she was sorting photographs.

When the talk ended, they met at the door. Gu Ming said first that his father’s results were good, then explained the lateness in a few words: the last report had taken an extra twenty minutes.

“I know,” Liang Xia said. “You sent a message.”

They walked a short way along the river, talking about the restoration methods the teacher had demonstrated and about which nearby shop had good noodles. At the fork in the path, Gu Ming asked if she wanted to have dinner together. She said she was meeting a friend tonight, and that next week would work.

He did not take it as a rejection and look hurt. She did not cancel her existing plans on the spot to spare his feelings. They stood by the river and settled on a date that suited them both.

When she got home, Liang Xia stuck the new group photo to the side of the refrigerator. The photo from ten years ago was still in a folder on her computer, its filename keeping the date it was taken. The place where one person was missing had not been filled in, and it did not need to be filled in anymore.

Her phone lit up. Gu Ming had sent a restaurant address, followed by a clear time. She replied “Okay,” thought a moment, and added: I’ll be there on time. If anything changes, I’ll tell you ahead.

Wind moved through the drying rack outside the window. She stood in the kitchen, set the washed glasses upside down on the draining mat, and felt no grand echo inside her. Only that, on some evening next week, there was one more thing worth looking forward to. That thing belonged to now. It no longer needed an old photograph to lend it proof.