You Nodded Then: The Script You Chose Before You Were Born

My senior sat across from me. The tea had gone cold. After he said those words, a plane-tree leaf fell outside the window and stuck to the half-open glass, taking a long time to drop off.

He said, "Before you were born, you sat in a vast library and turned through the table of contents of this life yourself. You saw the hardships, the partings, the sleepless nights of loneliness. You thought you could bear them, so you signed and took this script."

I said I didn't remember.

He said, you don't need to remember. You only need to know — you nodded then.

We were silent for a while. He poured the cold tea into the pothos pot on the table and refilled it with hot water. The movement was light, as if doing something that had long been arranged.

That night I went home, opened my phone's notes, typed four words: I nodded. Then deleted. Typed again: I chose. Deleted again. In the end, nothing remained.

But I remembered that pothos. The edges of its leaves were a little yellow. When my senior poured the tea, he said this potted plant had been kept for three years and had never bloomed.

In the second month after the breakup, my friend Lao Zhou called every night at seven on the dot. He didn't console me, just asked, "Have you eaten?" If I said yes, he hung up. If I said no, he appeared downstairs ten minutes later, carrying two bowls of congee and a plate of pickled vegetables, sat across from me and ate, then took the bowls away without a single extra word.

One day in the third month, he called as usual. I picked up and said, "I've eaten." He paused, said, "Good," and hung up. That night he never called again.

I knew he'd judged that I no longer needed that call.

He never said "you need to move on," nor "time heals everything." He just put the congee on the table, took the empty bowls away, repeated it for sixty days. That act itself confirmed one thing for me: I was still alive, could still eat, could still sit up, could still answer the phone.

When I lost my job, I sat in front of the computer, scrolled through job sites until there were no new postings, then started writing a résumé that could never be sent — to my twenty-year-old self. I wrote: The company you should have joined in your graduation year has now gone under. Everything you worried about later never happened. Everything you worried about missing, you never missed.

After writing, I saved it as "Draft 1" and turned off the computer, went downstairs to the convenience store, and bought a pack of cigarettes. I don't smoke. I just tore it open, smelled it, and threw it into the trash. That act meant: I don't need this, but I know many have needed it.

On the morning my father passed, one of the lights in the hospital hallway was broken, flickering. A nurse pushed a cart past; the wheels made a very thin sound on the tiles, like something slowly loosening. I sat on the bench, holding the peel of an orange in my hand. I'd bought that orange the day before and put it on the bedside table. He hadn't had time to peel it.

Back home, I put that orange on the top shelf of the fridge. Later, every time I opened the fridge, I saw it. The skin had wrinkled, shriveled, its color changed from orange-yellow to dark brown. I never threw it away.

Until one day, a friend came over for dinner, opened the fridge to look for eggs, and asked me, "What's this?" I said, "An orange." He said, "Can you eat it?" I said, "No." He gave me a look, asked no more, and closed the fridge door.

That night I took it out and put it in the cup my father used to drink tea from. The cup was white porcelain, with a ring of tea stain at the bottom that wouldn't wash off. I placed the orange on the cup's rim, and it fit just right, stuck there. The next day it fell off, rolled under the table. When I bent down to pick it up, my head hit the table's edge, and it hurt for a long time.

I sat on the floor, clutching that dried-up orange, and suddenly remembered what my senior had said — you nodded. You thought you could bear it.

At that moment I realized, being able to bear it doesn't mean I don't feel pain. It means that after the pain, I can still bend down to pick up that orange.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, with something in the dream that I can't name, like a fish slipping through my fingers. I sit up to drink water, look out the window at one or two lights in the building across, and think: if the world is an illusion, who turned on that light? What is that person doing? Is he staying up late writing a report, or putting a child to sleep, or just like me, just surfaced from an indescribable dream, sitting here in a daze?

These thoughts have no answers. But I remembered something: last month, I found a page in an old notebook, written seven years ago. The handwriting was messy. The last line read: "She left today. I probably won't get better."

I looked at that line, calmly turned to the next page, and saw I'd written: "Tomorrow go to the supermarket to buy rice."

Between those two lines, three days had passed. I couldn't remember anything — how I went to the supermarket, how much rice I bought, what I did after I came back. But that instruction "buy rice" had been written down, which meant I did go, did cook, did live a few more days.

What is illusory is the world, not that bag of rice.

So now I have a habit: whenever I feel I can't hold on, I write a line in my phone, recording one concrete little thing. Like "It rained today, umbrella broke, got soaked coming home." Like "The neighbor's cat lay on the windowsill all afternoon." Like "Made noodles, added an extra egg."

These things have no meaning whatsoever. But they are my own choices. I chose an egg, chose an umbrella, chose an afternoon watching a cat.

My senior also said another thing that day. He said, every person we meet comes to leave a mark on us. Some have loved you; when they leave, they leave a warm mark on you, and in winter it warms on its own. Some have hurt you; when they leave, they leave a cold mark, and later when you meet someone similar, that mark will ache first, warning you.

I asked, what about those who hate me?

He said, those who hate you leave the shallowest marks, because hatred doesn't last. What truly lasts are those people — they leave a habit in you. For example, you now walk on the right side because someone held your hand and walked that way when you were little. For example, before making tea you rinse the cup with hot water because someone taught you. For example, you stop and listen to a certain song all the way through, even though you don't really like it.

He said, every habit on you is a will left by someone else. They are no longer here, or they've gone far away, but you're still carrying out their instructions.

That night I went home, and when I made tea, I unconsciously rinsed the cup first with hot water. The sound of water over white porcelain was very light, like an unfinished sentence.

As I write this, the pothos outside the window is still alive. The yellow at the edges of its leaves hasn't spread, nor shrunk. It remains like this, neither withering nor flourishing, having kept me company for three years.

I didn't show this to my senior. He probably doesn't need to see it.

I just wrote those things down — the sound of cold tea being poured into the flowerpot, the sixty days of congee bowls being taken away, that dried-up orange in the fridge, the "buy rice" from seven years ago, and the seven o'clock calls every night.

All these things together are the truest part of the script I chose.

They are not great, not conclusive, not worth deep reflection.

They just happened to me, and then I remembered them.

You ask me whether fate is written.

I don't know. All I know is that day when I saw that orange on the top shelf of the fridge, I took it down and put it into my father's teacup. It got stuck at the rim, like a period.

Later it fell off and rolled under the table.

When I bent to pick it up, my head hit the table's edge.

I sat on the floor, clutching it, stood up, and put it back in the fridge.

That act wasn't thought out — it did itself. Just like that person three years ago in the library turning through the table of contents, he didn't overthink it either; he just nodded.

After nodding, he picked up the script, stood up, and walked toward the door.

The light outside the door was very bright. He squinted.

Then he walked in.