The hospital’s young employees’ group had a spring outing. He cherished this outing particularly, because it was getting less and less likely they’d invite him again. This time, the trip organizer was deliberately mysterious, pulling down the blinds on all the coach windows and having everyone guess where they were once they arrived. The first one to guess correctly won a prize. He knew where they were the instant he stepped off the coach, but he kept quiet.

The highest peak of Mount Siyun stood before him. The pearl-like spherical roofs on its summit glittered in the sunlight.

After someone guessed where they were, he told the trip organizer that he wanted to go to the observatory to visit an acquaintance. He left on foot, following the meandering road up the mountain.

He hadn’t lied, but the woman whose name he didn’t even know wasn’t part of the observatory staff. After ten years, she probably wasn’t here anymore. He didn’t actually want to go inside, just to look around at the place where, ten years ago, his soul, hot, dry, and as bright as the sun, spilled into a thread of moonlight.

One hour later, he reached the mountaintop and the observatory’s white railings. Its paint had cracked and faded. Silently, he took in the individual observatories. The place hadn’t changed much. He quickly located the domed building that he’d once entered. He sat on a stone block on the grass, lit a cigarette, then studied the building’s iron door, spellbound. The scene he’d long cherished replayed from the depths of his memory: with the iron door half open, in the midst of a ray of moonlight like water, a feather drifted in….

He was so completely steeped in that long-gone dream that when the miracle happened, he wasn’t surprised: the observatory’s iron door opened for real. The feather that once had emerged from the moonlight drifted into the sunlight. She left in a hurry to go into another observatory. This couldn’t have taken more twenty seconds, but he knew he wasn’t mistaken.

Five minutes later, they reunited.

This was the first time he’d seen her with adequate light. She was exactly as he’d imagined. He wasn’t surprised. It’d been ten years, though. She shouldn’t have looked exactly like the woman barely lit by a few signal lamps and the moon. He was puzzled.

She was pleasantly surprised to see him, but no more than that. “Doctor, I make a round of every observatory for my project. In a given year, I’m only here for half a month. To run into you again, it must be fate!”

That last sentence, tossed off lightly, confirmed his initial impression: She didn’t feel anything more about seeing him again besides surprise. However, she still recognized him after ten years. He took a shred of comfort in that.