The screen flickered, humming low like a dying thing. His fingers hovered over the keyboard hesitant at first, trembling slightly.
Then he began to type.
The dead are not silent. They whisper what the living refuse to hear.
The words didn't come like they used to not polished, not poetic but raw. Real. They came like blood from a reopened wound, thick with memory, guilt, and everything he'd buried for too long.
His hands moved faster.
He wrote about being close to death, not in the grand, heroic sense, but in the quiet way it crept into your bones when the world no longer asked for you. He wrote what it felt like to be forgotten, to drown in silence, to sit in a dark room where even your name felt like a lie.
He stopped to light another cigarette. Inhaled. Exhaled.
Then he wrote about Xiaoyu her smile, her voice, the way she once asked, "Why are your stories always about sad people?" He didn't have an answer then. He wasn't sure he had one now. Only that sadness had never left him.
The wine burned down his throat. He welcomed the sting. It helped him remember.
He wrote about his father cold, distant, always reminding him that dreams didn't pay bills. And his mother, who never raised her voice, only her eyes when no one was looking. Powerless. Always powerless.
He wrote as if someone was listening.
Because if no one else would, maybe death would.
This wasn't just a story anymore. It wasn't a comeback, a career move, or an act of desperation.
It was confession. It was surrender. It was all he had left.
He puffed again, letting the smoke curl around the screen like a ghost.
"This," he whispered to the quiet room, "is the last one."
And he kept writing.