That Song
On the beach, sand gently kicked up by her steps reflected the fading glow of the setting sun. She couldn’t quite understand what that warm sense of loneliness was. In the blue moment, the smoke exhaled from her mouth rose slowly to the air. Like static electricity, it sparked a slight yet annoying sense of disappointment. Silence. A feeling that everything was about to end before it even began, making her body feel as if it were slowly sinking. Everything would end with the rise of tomorrow's sunset.
Across the street, faintly, a song drifted from a restaurant, pulling her thoughts back to days ago. After hearing that song somewhere, she couldn’t get it out of her head. She quietly downloaded it so she could repeat it anytime. It wasn’t her usual kind of music, but it carried something–an elusive sense of familiarity and a fragile security that made her feel warmth.
Later, on the drive to that beach, the song came up randomly in the playlist. She tried to observe the expression of the person in the driver’s seat on her left. That person, replying to messages while driving, seemed to simply need some kind of melody to break the silence of the background. Whatever was playing sounded the same. Silence. Her gaze shifted to the right. Through the window, glimpses of the beaches appeared, scattered behind sparse buildings.
White sand and marble-topped restaurants. A carefully maintained atmosphere of ease and weightless summer stood here, in contrast to the gritty roads and windswept sands they just drove pass. She couldn’t tell if this was a form of self-deception, an illusion maintained by the avoidence before the inevitable collapse of a dream, or simply an unrepressable wish.
More than a year later, as they sat in a dimly lit restaurant, this song, forgotten in the corners of memory, played without warning. Silence. Their eyes met and exchanged a smile. Yes, that person had eventually come to know the song, and she believed that this was what she had desperately imagined and anxiously grasped as the shape of warmth.
Yining Fang, 2025