In the clutches of Winter, I eat a dried fig for dinner and dream of the woman I left on the bridge. At the threshold where Xīngpíng ends and the road begins, she once clasped my hands and told me, eat well, Sū Yí, before turning to leave.

In my dreams, I’m no longer standing two-footed on the planks of well-trodden elm but instead balanced precariously on the mossy méi huā zhuāng of the Academy, the place where I learned of the Knowledge and the Way of Things. Across the sawtooth water is her pale face in the light of the moon. Behind me is the steady ground of sandy shores. There’s a voice in my head which I understand more than hear, saying, forget this, give this burden to someone outside of us.

In my dreams, the moment freezes because I need longer to make the choice, to consider all our options. 

That’s the nature of dreams—time can stop, and she’ll still be there. So I find myself doing what I never dared, leaping toward her and not away, holding her until the dawn draws over and the hushed veil falls—

And that’s the nature of dreams—one moment she’s soft under your hands and the next, she’s gone.

We had cast a pair of jiào bēi to decide who would embark on the pilgrimage to meet the Knowledge.

In the examination, we had tied in aptitude, but she argued it should be her on the mere account of her seniority. Despite this, I pleaded my case to the Master, told him that my youth climbing the crumbling paths of Tài Shān readied me well for the journey, and he found merit in my departure as well as hers.

He couldn’t choose. The two of us together would be a waste. Someone should stay behind. 

So I threw the blocks: one landed yīn, one landed yáng—the deity’s agreement. I thought she might have cried for me, but instead she only knelt there in the scholar’s room, a stone unmoved.

For ones endowed with the Knowledge such as us, the road to Dìyù is the simplest path to take. It appears in the pale pattern of the cypress leaves, or the arc of the swallows, or the thinnest streaks of smoke from the west. I surrendered myself to the Way of Things and held my hand to the void which spoke not in sound but in understanding. It led me by its billowing hands to the white mountain roads that would soon become the End.

I winter on. 

Dry fig skin scrapes the roof of my mouth as I chew.

I remember how, in summer, she and I held our hands beneath purpling fruits and called upon the Breeze to press them to our palms. I remember how she ran her thumbnail along the bottom and pulled the fig into halves. In sunlight, its wet, yellow seeds gleamed like flecks of gold, and the red juice of its flesh curving into her cuticles frightened me into believing the blood was hers.

She fed me figs by the palmful, and made me chew the skin, because it, too, was a blessing. She pointed me to the windless sky and said, why do we ever ask for more?

I would chew, and chew, pretending I didn’t understand the question beneath it all.

The road to Dìyù is not a complicated one, if you surrender to the journey. One only needs to follow the voice which whines through the threads of the world and give in to its yearning tug. Our cultivated bodies, so ripe with the drunken light of Knowledge, know where they must go, and how they must sway, like a blade of grass among the multitudes.

The Master told me to tie a totem against my skin so I would remember my voice among the chorus, but I had nothing to anchor me, neither village nor home. When she found out, she gave me her mother’s silk hébāo—not as an heirloom, but to carry the wrinkled bodies of eighteen figs, one for each day of the journey. Because of her, I left Xīngpíng with a purse full to bursting and my hips bruised softly from its swinging weight. 

Now, I chew the toughened skin, remembering all that was, and all that will never be. I chew and swallow and let its sorrowful sweetness tide me through the nights.

Time blurs in these hallowed grounds. I walk through the snow. I dream of her often. I wake up breathless and empty-handed. I only know the days must be passing because the weight of her hébāo against my hips is becoming an idea, a memory. The days must be passing—its rough, cotton cord is rubbing a rash against my waist.

I want to untie these bindings. I want this pain to abate, to return every bruise of my feet to the earth, every blue burn of my skin to the snow. Even more, I want to shed the weight of this body to join the minutiae of the Way. How have I endured until now? So weighted, the white robes I must wear, so harsh the gleam of its silk—and why? 

The significance eludes me. I cannot recall. The cord of the hébāo against my skin has chafed it raw, and I cannot endure the pain any more. 

I stop in the shelter of a cave I find by following a white fox. In its depths, I undress, prying loose the pán kòu knots from their loops with my stiff hands. I reach through the slits of my garments to my wound. I mean to shed these silks to sleep in the snow in repose, but when I touch the cotton cord, its wetness surprises me and my hands draw back.

There, by the light of the walls, I can still make out color on the tips of my fingers—a layered red which, fallen in snow, becomes a suggestion of purple—a suggestion of the days when her hands cupped the figs we deemed the brightest of our lands, no matter its vastness. I remember the fear which once took me at the thought of her injury, and I remember again this journey: not why I must undertake it, but why she must not. 

When at last the tears I never knew I possessed run their course, I reach into the hébāo for one of the dwindling few. 

It’s only when I bite down to a sharp bitterness that I realize the figs have gone bad. 

But I have always known how to chī kǔ.

So even as the taste of rot coats my throat, even as the Winter storm thickens and the memory of her name pales, I endure—I swallow it down. I chew and swallow, thinking nothing of it until distant memories, like Fire drawn out from the Knowledge at the call of the flint, find purchase on my tongue—

That day on the bridge when I left Xīngpíng for the road, when she still had her hand on my sallow skin, and she told me to eat well—was it truly all she said? 

The bitterness takes root on my tongue, and in its clutches, the full memory returns to me like a bell-toll. 

The words in my dreams are as thin as a thread of silk, but this voice is neither mine nor that of the Knowledge. It is one greater, which encompasses everything—one of brightest, ringing truth.

It was no dream at all, but she, who said it, she, who pleaded in the end: forget this, give this burden to someone outside of us.

One breath, I considered it—but by duty, I turned to walk away on steady ground.

That which lives in the depths of Dìyù is no monster, despite what those outside of our Academy may think. 

In the exhalation of the Knowledge, there is tremendous beauty. The Breeze and the Fire become alive, and the Way of Things subsumes us all in a myriad of colorless light which threads between our cultivated fingers. In the exhalation of the Knowledge, the world becomes ceaselessly bright, and the light is everywhere—in the cypress leaves, the swallows, the thinnest streak of smoke. Everywhere, this cradling wonder, with its heartbeat ever-pulsing through the benthic hours of the night. 

When I finally meet the fountainous vein of the world which we name Knowledge in our loss of words, I’m long past the snow. At the End of the world, the void clenches my shoulders like the Master’s hand, and the soft ground of air soothes the flayed skin of my soles. 

At the End of the world, there is a sliver of light through the dark which is arterial-bright and unknowable. Suddenly, I understand its slumbering hunger and pain and longing for something beautiful—something full of the light which it has given.

I understand this yearning, and I understand the nature of its breath—that at the end of this exhalation, the inhalation must follow if it is to continue. Nothing is bottomless, not even this light. 

I think the last fig holds the memory of her, so I saved it for the End. 

When the light of the Knowledge dims, I sense it is time. I run my thumb along the dried bottom of the fig and pull its toughened skin into halves. The white mold at the center of the crumbling seeds is so dear to me—this bitterness which I know will hold a world. 

As the dark descends, I press it to my tongue right before the void clenches me in its tomb.

As the vein opens to take in my light, I feel the full weight of its hunger and know that I must give it everything. I surrender it all without question—all that I am, all that I will be, every day I basked in the sun with her, and every day I never will. 

I surrender myself until I feel a tug against the tide. 

It’s so bitter, this rotten fig. There’s so much in the taste of it—like the memory of her hand clutching mine on that bridge, or the blood on her bitten lips as she sat unmoving in the scholar’s room, or the warmth which we both know can still be—Through it all, there’s a voice. A yearning which subsumes everything else: Come back to me, Sū Yí. Come home.