Five Years And A Lifetime Chapter 08
Before the final hour approached, I never believed in fate. But now, I do.
When I was eight years old, a fallen steel rebar at a construction site left my father comatose. My mother dragged me to church, where we spent the entire night on our knees in prayer, yet he never woke up.
At eighteen, when my mother contracted COVID, I spent another night praying in church and bought her a cross bracelet. In the end, she was cremated with that very bracelet on her wrist.
Perhaps every life was predestined. The poor were bound to endless hardship, and lovers were fated to part.
After coming back from church that day, I started coughing up blood. Arthur rushed me to the hospital in the middle of the night, and Stacey personally arranged my room. As I lay in bed, I watched him making phone calls in the hallway; his posture stood ramrod straight.
Hanging up the phone, he walked in with a gentle smile. “There is a specialist consultation tomorrow. You should get some rest.”
I beckoned him over, and he sat beside me. I reached out to touch his face, noticing how much weight he had lost lately. “Arthur, I haven’t finished my novel yet.”
“No rush,” he whispered. “You can finish it once you get better.”
I stayed silent.
During my final month in that hospital bed, hooked up to countless tubes, I asked Arthur to dictate the final chapter for me.
In our story, the lovers met on a high school campus and eventually walked down the aisle. After marriage, they lived in deep affection, growing old together. The terminal diagnosis in the story turned out to be a mistake, just a simple mix-up. In that fictional world, there was no pain, no disease, and no sudden tragedies.
They lived a peaceful, quiet life, side by side until the very end.
Arthur sat at my bedside, clutching a pen in one hand and holding mine with the other. He wrote down every single word, pausing now and then to ask me, “How should this part go?”
With my eyes closed, I murmured, “Write it however you like.”
He wrote for a while before his voice turned husky. “Catherine, the readers are asking why the ending is so happy. They say it feels almost too unrealistic.”
I offered a small smile. “Then let us be unrealistic just this once.”
With a shaky voice, Arthur read the readers’ comments aloud to me. “I can’t believe this isn’t a tragedy; this is wonderful!”
“They finally ended up together, what a sweet ending!”
“And yet, after reading it, my heart still hurts…”
“There were no major catastrophes, but why do I feel like it shouldn’t end this way…”
“The author is being way too idealistic…”
As I listened, my eyelids grew impossibly heavy. Arthur’s voice drifted away, sounding muffled and distant.
In the final second before darkness took over, I felt a warm kiss upon my forehead.
“Catherine, in the next life, you must live a long, peaceful life.”Â
In the days following Catherine’s passing, Arthur lost all track of time. He switched off his phone, shut out the world, and spent his days drinking alone in the apartment they had shared.
Monica stopped by a few times, knocking on the door. When no one answered the door, she sat outside until midnight. In the end, she gave up and left. Stacey arranged for food deliveries, but the meals sat untouched at his doorstep until they turned cold.
Eventually, Monica sent over a massive cardboard box. It was heavy, with the recipient name simply reading Arthur.
Slumping on the hallway floor, he cut the box open to find rows of neatly stacked presents. Every gift was wrapped in brown paper, each bearing a label marked with an age from twenty-five to one hundred.
“Age twenty-five: A tie clip to match that blue suit you bought last year.”
“Age twenty-six: A razor. Don’t be lazy, remember to shave regularly.”
“Age twenty-seven: A handwritten letter. Open it and take a look.”
“Age twenty-eight: A fountain pen for you to write scripts.”
“Age forty: I bet you have less hair now, so I bought you a hat.”
“Age sixty: Reading glasses. Aren’t they cute? The frames are round.”
“Age eighty: Can you still walk around? If not, sit in a rocking chair and read. I sent you a whole crate of books.”
“Age one hundred: Arthur, live a good life all the way to one hundred, and see as much of this world as you can for me.”
At the very bottom of the box lay a stack of handwritten greeting cards. The handwriting on each card was shaky and uneven, growing noticeably weaker toward the end, as if the person holding the pen was running out of strength. Yet, at the end of every single card, a tiny, crooked heart was drawn.
Arthur read through every card, moving slowly from age twenty-five to one hundred. Finally, he clutched the box to his chest and wept uncontrollably.
From that day forward, he began to eat again. He gradually quit drinking, stepped out into the sunshine, and even accepted a role in a new movie project.
At the movie’s launch event, a reporter asked why he had decided to make a comeback. He remained silent for a moment before replying, “Someone asked me to see more of this world on her behalf.”
The venue fell quiet for a brief moment, followed by a sudden burst of warm applause.
Returning home that evening, he unclasped the bracelet from his wrist and hung it over the bedside lamp. He lay down, watching the bracelet sway gently under the warm glow before drifting off to sleep.
In his dream, someone tapped the back of his hand. Turning around, he saw Catherine standing beneath an old tree wearing her high school uniform, beaming at him. As he walked toward her, she stood on her tiptoes, leaning close to his ear to speak in a soft, tender whisper.
“Arthur, in the next life, make sure you come find me sooner.”
He nodded. When he opened his eyes, daylight had already broken. The bracelet hung quietly from the lamp. Arthur sat up, pulled out the ring engraved with their initials from the drawer, and slid it back onto his ring finger.
Then he picked up his phone and posted on Twitter. Attached was a candid photo of a sunrise over a snow-capped mountain, capturing the two of them kissing in the golden morning glow.
The caption was a single short line: “Wait for me, Catherine.”
Side Story
Catherine first set eyes on Arthur during the third week of her freshman year in high school. After class, she was helping her mother tend to their hot dog stand. Squatting behind the cart to tidy things up, she heard a lazy voice call out from above, “Hey, I’ll take a…” The voice suddenly trailed off.
Looking up, she met a handsome, spirited young face. Arthur stared at her with wide eyes before letting out a soft curse. “Holy crap, did you get plastic surgery? You definitely didn’t look like this a few days ago…”
Catherine wiped her hands with an expressionless face. “I’m the owner’s daughter. Just helping out.”
“Oh, right, right.” Arthur scratched his head in embarrassment, the tips of his ears turning bright red. “Sorry about that, my brain is fried from pulling late nights. Anyway, one hot dog please, extra sauce.”
He ate that hot dog absentmindedly, stealing several glances at her along the way. Catherine pretended not to notice, though nothing escaped her eyes.
The next day, they ran straight into each other inside the classroom, sending Arthur’s test papers scattering across the floor. Just as Arthur was about to blow his top with morning frustration, he looked down and met a pair of familiar eyes.
“Huh? It’s you?”
Having attended class for weeks, only now did he realize that Catherine was actually his classmate.
Catherine was not considered attractive, a fact universally agreed upon by the rest of the class. Compared to the wealthy girls in their room, she paled in comparison. Her clothes were cheap street-market finds, and her skin was slightly tanned from helping her mother at the stand every day. She wore heavy, black-rimmed glasses, with thick bangs covering half her face.
Yet Arthur could never keep his eyes off her.
When she tallied accounts behind the hot dog cart, her head was bowed, long eyelashes casting soft shadows. When solving math problems, she would nibble on her pen cap, her brow slightly furrowed in concentration. When called on by the teacher, she would stand up, answer in a gentle, soft voice, and quietly sit back down once she finished.
After evening study sessions, Arthur always took a long detour just to buy a hot dog. Catherine’s mother was surprised at first, asking him why he dropped by every single day.
Eventually, she grew accustomed to his presence, greeting him with a smile whenever she saw him. “Back again, son? The usual?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, glancing sideways as he pulled out his wallet. “Where is Cathy tonight?”
“Cathy is doing her homework in the back room. Did you want to see her?”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary!” He grabbed his hot dog and darted off, his ears burning red all the way home.
His friends mocked him, calling him insane for falling for such an unattractive girl. In response, Arthur cornered the guy with the foulest mouth in an alley and beat him up. Afterward, he leaned against the wall, lighting a cigarette. Looking up, he saw Catherine standing at the entrance of the alley, holding her backpack straps and watching him quietly.
His heart skipped a beat, and he put out the cigarette as casually as he could. But Catherine didn’t say a word of criticism. She simply walked over and squatted down beside him. Setting her bag on the ground, she pulled out some iodine and band-aids. “Hold out your hand.”
He obediently held out his hand, and she leaned down to clean his scraped knuckles.
“Arthur,” she said while applying the disinfectant, “I really don’t care about what they say.”
“Well, I care,” he muttered under his breath.
That day, he assumed she hadn’t heard him. But Catherine had caught every single word.
Arthur traded his brand-new sports car in exchange for the permanent privilege of sitting right next to Catherine in class. Catherine gave him a quiet look, offered no comment, and simply went back to her assignment.
Arthur rested his head on the desk, watching her write for half the period before poking her arm gently. “Catherine, can I copy your homework?”
“Do it yourself.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You placed in the top ten during the last monthly exams.”
“That was only because I copied someone else.”
Catherine finally turned her head to face him. He gave her a wide grin. Sighing, she pushed her notebook toward him. “Give it back when you’re finished.”
“Will do!”
From that day on, he copied her homework every single morning. As the days went by, he started bringing her breakfast, milkshakes, and the soft cookies she loved.
Catherine refused at first, but he insisted, claiming that if she didn’t take them, he would throw them straight into the trash.
She had no choice but to accept.
Soon enough, the whole class realized Arthur was madly in love with Catherine. When someone tried teasing them during recess, Arthur kicked his chair away, shouting, “Mind your own damn business and get lost!”
Sitting at her desk, turning the pages of her book, Catherine felt her ears burning hot.
A month before graduation, Arthur suddenly grew quiet. He stopped copying her homework and ceased his restless antics, spending his days slumping over his desk, staring blankly out the window.
Catherine asked him what was wrong, but he insisted everything was fine. Only later did she learn that he had barely slept a wink for an entire month because he was secretly planning his confession to her.
On the night of the graduation party, he finally gathered his courage. He’d arranged for someone to cut the main power switch. In the sudden pitch-black darkness, he tapped the back of her hand, leaning close to her ear to ask, “Catherine, would you give me a chance?”
She fell silent for a long time, so long that he began to think he had been rejected. Then, he heard her ask in a quiet, fragile voice, “Arthur, how long are you willing to wait?”
His heart melted completely.
Deep inside, he thought to himself, “I would gladly wait a hundred years!”
