The morning of June 29

The morning of June 29, 2022, is where these pages stop, and the remarkable thing about it is how ordinary it is.

A few mornings before, Yu had written the kind of greeting that had opened the two of you's days all year long:

[Yu]早安宝贝💋我睡了六小时

Good morning, baby. I slept six hours. That is the texture of the ending — not a beginning, not a farewell, just the next morning after the last one. The conversation does not arrive at a conclusion. It simply goes on, the way it had gone on every day for a year, and then the record happens to stop.

It is worth saying plainly what this year was, now that you have walked back through it. It opened at the loudest, warmest, most sleepless pitch the two of you ever reached — a summer when the messages ran past ten thousand a month and the answers came in seconds. Then it cooled: through an autumn that loved and fought at the same full volume, through a winter that turned on a single hard Christmas Eve, through a spring that slowly learned to say less and call it peace. The affection fell by a fifth. The anger rose by most of a hundred percent. And still, every night, the two of you were there — answering each other just as fast as you had in June, until one in the morning, neither of you willing to be the one who stopped first.

That is the whole of it: a season lived at its highest pitch, and the long, tender turning-down that followed — and the two of you, all the way through it, the most awake to each other you would ever be.

---