Escaping from your sight, but peeping again and again...
Wanting to escape but what filled my mind still is the feeling of missing you.
Allow me in this night, nothing to listen, nothing to watch.
Just sitting in the center of the room, facing the candlelighting, missing you.
- Let me go with you, Phang Ling (found on the web)
She was strikingly beautiful, with big eyes, long eyelashes, double eyelids and cherry lips. These facial features had, to many, often contributed a successful career as a celebrity, but that wasn't the ending in this lifetime that she was hoping for. She had been reborn in different worlds and lifetimes, since ancient times, and then she had moved on to another world to be reborn during revolutionary times, until finally, she arrived in the current world, being reborn in the Y-generation.
In each lifetime that she had lived, she retained a small part of it in her memory. But she had clearly remembered in particular, her moments with a dashing winged man in black. She had lived a life of luxury, riches, poverty, joy, sorrow, and even been to hell and back, but despite being reborn for seven lifetimes, she had missed the one thing that she was looking for: love.
In her seventh lifetime, she was now Huo Zhi Xun, a 21-year old blogger and an undergraduate studying in an arts university. Behind that computer screen, she was everything that she wasn't, in the cyber world. She went by the alias 'ZSyn', which was a creative adaptation of her own name. Her photographs had been heavily edited with Photoshop, and with Snapchat filters added to mask her extraordinary beauty, which had caused her too much unnecessary attention.
When she was 12 years old, her father had been killed in an accident. Not long after, her mother had been found to have terminal cancer. So the young Zhi Xun had been brought up to be frugal by her childless aunt and uncle. Her aunt had brought her up with the mindset that she was to marry into a rich family to save them from financial burden, to relieve the heavy burden of her mother's medical and hospitalisation fees on their shoulders. As a teenager, she had to take up a few summer jobs to support her family.
When she went to university, she had met and started a relationship with the unpopular Herman He Xin, an artist from the social sciences faculty, where she too studied, but had pursued an academic degree in journalism. They had a few classes together, and she had met him in one of their classes. And yet, remembering her past with the winged man who she seemed to run into during her last six lifetimes, she had been skeptical if she would have a good ending in her relationship with Herman.
It was 2016. It had been a rainy Saturday morning when she decided to head to the university library to immerse herself in some books, since she could not afford to buy books on her own. Before going to the library, she had used the online library database to check if the books she had wanted were available, and wrote down on a piece of paper, their physical locations in the plentiful shelves of the library.
The books had been categorised and then arranged according to the names of their authors. As one such book had been placed on a high shelf out of her reach, she had stood on tiptoe with her high heels to grab hold of the book, but slipped and fell backwards, landing neatly in the arms of a tall stranger.
With the height of her high heels, she was tall enough to reach the stranger's face. Her cheek brushed against the stranger's face with their lips at a close proximity. Her heart beat wildly, but she quickly supported herself to stand up steadily and smiled meekly to avoid creating a commotion. Eyes followed them for a split second, and everyone then went back to doing their own things at the library, pretending as if nothing had happened. Gossip-mongers were common in their university library. They were like the paparazzi, and would not hesitate to take photographs of strangers with their mobile phones when given the chance.
"Be careful where you step, you might not be that lucky next time."
She froze, recognising that voice immediately. On a closer look, she realised that he had to be that winged man from her dreams and from her past. She had even seen him in her past six lifetimes. At this point, she didn't know what to do, whether to stay or run. Why hadn't she recognised him earlier? She had been too absorbed by his handsome looks to realise who he was.
Just as quickly as he had made his appearance, he was gone, leaving the book in her hands. She saw a pretty petite-looking girl walking away with the stranger as he disappeared into the distance.
When Herman arrived to pick her up from the library, she had her head in a pile of books, looking sleepy. After they left for dinner, unexpectedly Zhi Xun's mind was still on the eyes of the man earlier.
As a food blogger, Zhi Xun would normally take photographs of the food she ordered and post them on her blog after editing the photographs with emojis and filters to remedy the bad resolution of photographs taken with her phone camera. She could only look on when her classmates bought or received iPhones or Samsung Edge, she probably would never afford a good phone. Any money she brought back home had ultimately went to household expenses or to her mother's hospital bills.
In one year from now, she was going to graduate. If she and Herman managed to land a good job in the industry, perhaps she had a better chance for her mother and family to live in luxury. At the same time, it wasn't easy for fresh graduates with no experience to get a good paying job due to the vast number of new graduates from the various universities each year. She was aware that her mother needed a lot of money for her medical fees and hospitalisation. But what if they didn't land a good job for themselves? She felt that she had so much expectations from her family to marry into a rich family. She had thought of it as her responsibility to provide them with a better life, as they had given up a lot to bring her up after her father's death. Her aunt and uncle had always seen her as their own.
How much money could she earn from blogging? She made some earnings from advertisements on her blog, but she didn't receive that much hits to yield substantial earnings from advertising. In short, it wasn't much. It was not even enough for her to buy call credits for her phone.
A sudden beep from her computer screen interrupted her thoughts. She had just received an email from PayPal informing her that she had received a donation for a coffee. The donor's PayPal ID had been TYGao. She didn't know who that was, but she realised the very same person had left her a message on her blog.
It had said, "ZSyn, the photos look great. Wishing you happiness and good health." Zhi Xun had been touched by his sentiments. In her two years of blogging, she had yet to receive such a pleasant compliment or message from any visitors to her blog. Hopefully, it was a good omen that luck was coming her way, she hoped.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
