"Legend"

::aplayer{name=Legend - Faye Wong description="I'd rather spend this lifetime waiting for you to notice, I've always been by your side, never far away." src="[https://www.zhongfw.online/align-minio/musics/传奇.mp3](https://www.zhongfw.online/align-minio/musics/%E4%BC%A0%E5%A5%87.mp3)" cover="https://www.zhongfw.online/align-minio/musiccovers/1030738645.jpg"} My first job was in Wuxi. Right after graduation, I dragged my luggage alone onto a high-speed train heading south, handled onboarding, renting an apartment, and all sorts of trivial procedures by myself, with no acquaintances around. Fortunately, after starting work, most of the people nearby were fresh graduates like me, in similar situations and easy to talk to, so I didn’t feel especially lonely; my team lead, Xu Wenjing, was very kind and always called us “Mr./Ms. So-and-so.” At that time, the project was intense—we worked overtime every day to meet deadlines, and the pressure was suffocating. As a recent graduate, I wasn’t very adaptable and constantly wanted to return home to be alone, listen to music, watch videos; only then could I truly relax. During that period, whenever I got home after work and night fell into silence, giving me some quiet, a vague story would inevitably surface in my mind. *A story in which a girl secretly fell in love with a writer who had just moved in across the street. Day after day she waited by her door, just to catch a glimpse of him through the crack. Later, her family moved away, and this hopeless affection made her withdrawn and silent. Years later, she had grown into a beautiful woman but could never let go of that youthful longing. One day, she returned to her old home and met the writer again; on impulse, she gave herself to him. But after that night, he forgot her—because he had never loved her. Yet for the girl, it was enough, because she had always loved him deeply.* Every time I thought of this story, I would recall Ling Xueyan, the girl I had a crush on since middle school. Those years, I was just like the girl in the novel, hiding behind a door of inferiority, gazing at her from afar, quietly. By the time I realized I liked her, we had already been assigned to different classes and could only run into each other by chance in public places like the cafeteria or playground. So every noon, I would rush out of the classroom early to queue for lunch—just so I might catch a glimpse of her before the line of the next class blocked my view. That moment was the greatest satisfaction for me. It was a painful yet fervent unrequited love; I felt as if I would give everything for her, an almost obsessive emotion that outsiders found hard to understand. And the girl in the novel was like another version of me, or perhaps only she could understand and empathize with me. Because of this, I urgently wanted to know the title of that story and who wrote it. But the more I tried to recall, the fuzzier the memory became: author? title? nothing came to mind, only a rough outline lingering in my head. I tried searching with keywords based on those vague plot points, but the results were all irrelevant; later I added terms like “foreign novel,” “short story,” and even recalled another striking tale from what seemed like the same book—about a railway worker who encounters a ghost train emerging from a tunnel late at night… Following this clue, I searched for “ghost train short story,” hoping to identify the author first. Unfortunately, the search engine still offered no answer. I gave up again and again, only to think of it once more on a quiet night and search again, yet still found nothing. Gradually, I began to doubt: maybe this story doesn’t exist at all? Perhaps it was just a dream from my high school days—back then I often dreamed, and this “story” was merely a projection of inner longing, like how I had repeatedly met someone who truly loved me in dreams. I thought this story might not be real, that I probably misremembered, that there was no girl, that it had always been just me alone; after all, no one would love someone so deeply yet never speak up, it was all just me; only in dreams could an obsessive girl have a brief, tender ending, even if just for an instant. But for me, that was enough. Dreams seem never to become reality, and I need to keep living in reality. I live in a residential house full of last-century charm on Wanhua Road, its front door still a double-layer aluminum alloy one with glass, looking rather fragile. Pushing the door open, one seems to smell a damp, chilly air lingering in the atmosphere; the small living room holds a table surrounded by many cluttered gift boxes, and in the center sits a black-and-white photo frame. The man in the picture looks fairly young, yet somehow makes it feel as if a long time has passed. The landlord is a kindly old lady with gray hair, who speaks the Wuxi dialect and often sits on a small stool at the doorway to enjoy the breeze. Seeing me come back from work, she always greets me with a cheerful smile. Sadly, I can’t understand the Wuxi dialect, so I just keep nodding and smiling, then tell her in Mandarin that I’m going to my room, and she waves goodbye. I live on the second floor; both the stairs and the entire second-floor flooring are wooden and creak when walked on, so when I first moved in I was quite afraid, feeling as if the whole second floor might suddenly collapse. My room is simple: an air conditioner, a bed, and a desk and chair, but thankfully it’s spacious and gets good light. In my free time, I often stay alone in the room, listening to music, opening IDEA, building my own website, planning, improving, changing it, striving to become the person I like, and feeling full of anticipation for that. Living alone isn’t actually easy; it seems stable and certain, but in truth it’s just an illusion of one’s inner world. In reality, I still have nothing, otherwise I wouldn’t often get trapped at night in memories of the past, recalling the joys and sorrows of school, love and hate, the people I met, and Xueyan. One night, I suddenly remembered visiting relatives in middle school, downloading music on their computer, recalling several songs I liked, remembering how I cried the first time I heard them, and eventually grew so tired of hearing them that I thought I’d never listen again—Faye Wong’s *Legend*. But over a decade has passed; what if I still like it? Thinking this, I switched to the song. Writing in progress...