I hadn’t looked up at the crescent moon in a long time.
The truth was, I wanted to see it.
I just didn’t dare.
I had already finished elementary school, but I was still living at the school.
At night, the entire school was almost empty.
Only two elderly servants remained, an old man and an old woman.
Neither of them really knew what to make of me.
I wasn’t a student anymore.
I wasn’t a teacher.
And I certainly wasn’t one of the servants.
Yet most of the little jobs I did were not much different from theirs.
I spent many nights walking alone around the courtyard.
Whenever the crescent moon appeared, I would quickly go back inside.
I simply couldn’t bring myself to look at it.
Even without seeing it, I could picture it clearly in my mind.
I could imagine exactly where it was hanging in the sky.
It was even worse on windy nights.
The soft breeze seemed to carry the moon’s cold light straight into my heart.
And once that happened, all the memories would come rushing back.
Everything I had tried to forget.
Everything I had survived.
The life I was living was already hard enough.
Those memories made it feel even heavier.
Sometimes I felt as if my heart were a bat flying through the moonlight.
The world around it was bright.
But the bat itself was always dark.
That was how I felt.
No matter how far I ran or how freely I tried to live, I couldn’t escape the darkness inside me.
I couldn’t see any future worth looking forward to.
I couldn’t find a reason to hope.
But I had stopped crying a long time ago.
Instead, I simply walked through each day with my eyebrows tightly drawn together.
That had become my habit.
Perhaps that was what growing up had taught me.
When there is nothing left to cry for, you simply learn to keep going.