Lately, there have been several consecutive gloomy days, with leaves falling to the ground and the temperature dropping further.
However, on the day Meng Chen woke up, it happened to be a rare sunny day. The autumn sunlight streamed in through the windowsill, passing through the pot of white jasmine and slowly spreading across the floor, scattering fragments of light.
The young man lay on the pristine hospital bed, his eyelashes fluttered lightly, like a butterfly suddenly awakened, and he slowly opened his eyes.
Perhaps it was an illusion, but it seemed someone had been holding his hand all along. Meng Chen felt a warm touch on his hand. But as he struggled, those hands seemed to have been burned and suddenly disappeared.
Footsteps hurriedly ran out of the room.
Soon after, it seemed a group of people came in.
The first familiar voice Meng Chen heard was his father’s. The old man choked a little as he kept thanking the doctors and nurses who came to check on his condition.
“Can you see?” A doctor extended his hand and waved it in front of Meng Chen’s eyes.
“It’s very blurry, just a dark shadow,” Meng Chen replied after a moment of hesitation.
After a series of examinations, the doctor finally concluded:
“The patient is doing well, all indicators are improving, and his vision is recovering. He should be able to see soon.”
“He’s made it through successfully,” the doctor sighed in relief.
After giving careful instructions, the doctor finally left.
“Heaven has finally opened its eyes…” the old man continued to mumble.
Was it really heaven’s blessing? Meng Chen dared not believe it. In his life, he had suffered too much; even as a child, he had never won a five-cent lottery, as if luck had always eluded him.
Meng Chen pondered in a daze, but he was too exhausted and soon fell asleep again.
Meng Chen was awakened by a fragrant scent. As Meng Chen had just woken up and couldn’t eat anything else, the old woman had boiled some soup to nourish him.
The soup was in a white porcelain bowl, and the spoon tapped against it with a clear sound. The old man helped Meng Chen sit up, and the old woman, holding the spoon, said softly as she had done when Meng Chen was a child:
“Be good, open your mouth.”
At the moment the soup entered his mouth, Meng Chen’s tears suddenly fell.
The taste was too familiar, so familiar that Meng Chen felt he was hallucinating.
“Chen Chen—” The old woman couldn’t help but choke up first, she said, “Mom is late.”
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When she left that year, she had thought about taking little Meng Chen with her, but she was in so much pain all over that she didn’t even have the strength to pick up the child. She didn’t actually plan to go far, just find a job somewhere in the small town where Father Meng couldn’t find her, earn some money, go back and divorce the man, and then take her Chen Chen away.
But by chance, when she went back, Meng Chen had already left.
So she kept looking, kept looking, until a few years ago, she ran into Meng Chen at a bar.
Chen Chen had grown taller, very good-looking, with eyes so much like hers.
So she found a job near the bar too, coming and going frequently, so she could always run into him a few times.
What mother could truly abandon her own child?
She would always stay by her child’s side, Chen Chen would always be Mom’s little one.
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Back in the present, Meng Chen was embraced by the old woman.
—This was a hug that arrived more than ten years late.
Meng Chen clutched his mother’s sleeve tightly.
The old man stood by, watching his “wife” and “son.”
This family could not go back, but at this moment, it seemed to be slowly healing.
Everything will be fine.
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