The Healing Sunshine (一厘米的阳光)

Final Chapter - The Love of a Lifetime (1)

Jǐ Yi very soon received a call from the newspaper, urging her to hurry back to work again.

When she arrived in her office, she took the information that one of her co-workers was handing her and flipped through it. They were the latest photographs after Cyclone Nargis swept through south-central Myanmar at the beginning of May. With just this one cyclone, the death toll had already exceeded 130,000.

The student intern standing beside her had brought over an already-translated foreign news agency report on the xenophobic conflict in South Africa, in which more than sixty fatalities had already occurred.

......

Nothing had changed.

Each minute, each second, all sorts of Heaven-sent disasters and manmade catastrophes were taking place. And she was to process all this information and, after filtering and compiling it, send it out; this was her job.

But her life...

In that moment as she took a seat in front of the computer, turned on the monitor, and pressed the power button, she recalled that awkward scene from several days ago.

When she, Jì Chengyang, and Grandpa Jì left the dependents' residence area, she had looked vacillatingly for a long time at Grandpa Jì, who had been inside the black sedan, but still she had not said a single word of farewell.

"Just address him as Grandpa right now. In the future, when it's time to change the form of address, you can slowly adjust to it then."

This was what Jì Chengyang had instructed her at the time. With his astuteness, he had clearly beheld and understood all of her little struggles and hesitations.

That evening, Jì Nuannuan had called her, on one hand congratulating Jǐ Yi for finally overcoming all obstacles and becoming half a member of the Jì family. At the same time, she had quietly complained that the one wish she had had since she was a child about her marriage was that Jǐ Yi would be her maid-of-honour, and in order to achieve that wish, Nuannuan had even secretly ordered the maid-of-honour gown already. But now, that wish was considered to have completely gone down the drain.

"My mom said, how ludicrous would that be, to have your future Little Aunt as your maid-of-honour," Nuannuan had grumbled. On the phone, she had moaned and sighed away until they hung up the phone.

The seniorities and positions in the family hierarchy had become utterly mixed up.

If time would turn back to the very first time she had called him Little Uncle Jì, it would be absolutely impossible for her to imagine that after ten and more years, she would no longer be calling this man before her by this form of address, this young man who at the time was dozens of centimetres taller than herself, who could pick her up and set her on his arm without feeling any strain at all; rather, she would address him with three simple characters: Jì Chengyang.

She finally understood the thinking of those people who now knew, or would know in the near future, about her relationship with Jì Chengyang. Even she, when she wanted to change how she addressed those in the Jì family, felt so awkward, let alone other people.

But Jì Chengyang was forever able to calmly and openly face everything.

Towards fate and one's own lot, towards those constant setbacks and defeats, he always had a candid unperturbedness that was beyond his years. And similarly, for the feelings in his heart that he had confirmed and validated, he also carried a calm openness that wholly disregarded all worldly views.

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As Jì Chengyang was about to be going for surgery, on the day she returned to work, her team director only arranged a morning's worth of work for her. Not hearing any movement when she arrived back at home in the afternoon, she changed her shoes and leisurely looked in each room for him. Because she was afraid he might be doing something, she did not call aloud to him. When she had walked far enough into the home that she was by the doorway of the study, she saw that the door was actually ajar.