She cried until there were no more tears to shed. She sank down on the floor, drew her legs up to her chest, and curled herself into a tight knot. She hung her head between her knees, as if in this posture she could shut the outside world out. However, those memories, those killing thoughts still found a way to penetrate whatever protection layer she could manage to find. When did grief end? Did it ever?

       In a weirdo undetached moment, she peeled the pages of her memory backward. She turned back, past pages of pages waiting, confusing, and scaring, and there, she saw a five-year-old girl who just lost her mother. That was her. She remembered that moment, remembered those pointing fingers at her back, and remembered those whispers behind:” Did you believe that? Her mother just ran away with a man. What a shame!” Those whispers amplified themselves, eventually turned to a deafening fact: “HER MOTHER DOESN’T WANT HER.”

       She was too young to deal with it. What’s wrong with her, what kind of problem she possibly had that even her mother, her own mother didn’t want her? Therefore she simply pretended it had not happened. Since then, she always had a box deep inside her heart. It’s airtight, soundproofed, and padlocked. It’s where she kept things she didn’t know how to deal with. However, sometimes those things still got out. They went out to hunt her----trigged by the most insignificant things, like the stare from a stranger passing by, but most of time, it was by the look on his father’s face. After her mother left, with increasing frequency, she’d caught her father watching her with a heartbreak mixture of pain and hatred, and finally she’d understand it was her mother he was seeing in her face, in her mannerism. As if she’d stopped existing, as if she became invisible.

          When she was 14, she was offered a job at beauty salon in Chengdu, which was far away from home. She jumped at this opportunity and left her hometown, her father and those whispers behind. This job had just been part of her motivation to leave. She’d run from her grief, from her father’s pain, from being shadow of another person, from the naked truth of being abandoned. It’s not an idea job, but it offered her a shelter from the cold, a place which almost closed to a home. For the first time of her life, she felt peace and almost happy. Although sometimes she doubted there might be something more behind her co-workers’ mocking face, but she never tried to find it out. Life had taught her a hard way that thinking did no good to a person like her, and sometime it’s better to wedge her head into the sand. She spent her entirely life trying to please the others, never argue, never voice her opinion. Life was easier this way.

       It went on like this until a letter came to her, a letter from her mother. The letter was tucked safely in an envelope with Guangzhou’s postmark. She ripped it open with trembling hands. Nothing out of ordinary. Just a letter written from a mother to a daughter: how she found out that she was in Chengdu, how she missed her these years, and a few catchups. But for Ping, this letter was the sounding proof that after all her mother hadn’t abandoned her. For the first time, she wanted to stand firmly on her feet and told the others loudly: “You are wrong!” She read and read until she could memorize every word. Then the second, the third letters came. Each time she received her mother’s letter, she was happy like a child with a candy. Sometimes, she let herself indulge in pure fantasy: One day her mother would come and then they would live happily together. She would never be along again.

       The fourth letter came with a cell phone----something she had wanted for a long time.  This time she was beyond happy. She wanted a cell phone so badly that in the past few months she had scrimped and saved every penny, and now she had a cell phone, and enough money to buy a train ticket! Perhaps she was carried away by this unexpected gift, or perhaps she was simply scared that if given a second thought, she might chicken out, she hadn’t stopped to wonder if her mother was, like her, anxious of a reunion. Without telling anyone, she got on the train to Guangzhou. At that time she didn’t know that the distance between her and her mother was not just two thousand miles away---a mere train ride, forty hours and it could be crossed.

     She found it out now.