Twilight: Bright Sunshine

Before the Cullen family arrived, I didn't know that those legends and dark stories were actually a different kind of reality. I didn't even know that the place where I lived was just a middle-aged woman's dream about love. --May 17, 2003

Forks is a place that is soaked in rain and moss all year round. There is no sunshine all year round, and the gloomy sky makes the main color here never bright and colorful. The only color here is emerald green, which is a color representing vitality. In Forks, it always gives people a sense of pressure that is almost forming a sense of substance.

I need the cloudy days here, but I don't like the green here.

Every time I drive my second-hand royal blue Ford through the forest, I can see the towering Douglas firs appearing and disappearing in the light green mist, and the green and blue mountains are covered with conifers. Some wild deer occasionally appear beside the road. Maybe I should thank the unique cultural customs here. No one will easily shoot these cute forest animals and send them to the table.

I don't know how the trajectory of life extends. I have read many books about past lives and many seemingly true reincarnation stories, but they don't seem to help me much. When I was eight years old, I put aside those weird topics about life and planned to live seriously.

I remember that I was Chinese in my previous life. From the moment I decided to give up the pursuit of where I came from, the fact that I was Chinese was a matter of my previous life.

I got sick when I was young, and died after being in the hospital bed for several years. At that time, my relatives and friends had given up my life before me. I remember that when I closed my eyes on the hospital bed, only the warm afternoon sun outside the window climbed onto my face, gently accompanying me through the last journey of my life.

In the last few years of ordinary life, it seems that all the ups and downs in life are concentrated, grief and suffering, facing the decadence of life and death, and the pace of everyone leaving and my own struggle to not give up, until finally hugging a ray of sunshine and calmly welcoming eternal sleep, a lifetime of life just fell like this.

I didn't feel regret when I died, and I was even relieved. I think my short life was dull, but after I got sick, I finally reached maturity and sublimation. At the end, I could even hear the moment when my heart was perfect and the flowers were blooming.

I woke up again in a warm embrace, with blood all over my eyes, and I was in a trance. A woman kept touching my hair. She was pressed under the car, and I was tightly protected in her arms.

I didn't know that a person could bleed so much, just like a broken faucet and water pipe, no one could stop the blood from gushing out. The woman was a foreigner, with fair skin, golden hair with glass shards and black and red liquid, and three-dimensional and beautiful facial features. I heard her gradually weak murmur: "Claire, baby, mommy loves you, let's go pick up daddy, go pick up..."

I found that my face was full of tears and blood, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. I just accepted that I was dead, but I moved to another place when I opened my eyes.

I touched the woman's face with great effort. Her face was trembling with the paleness of death. I comforted her, "It's okay. Someone will come to save you."

The woman's eyes gradually became silent. I found that my tears began to flow again, but I was not so fragile that I would cry when I saw a stranger injured. My body and mind seemed to be out of sync.

I murmured to myself, "Someone will come to save you." After a long silence, I said, "Save us."

In the end, I was the only one who was saved. They called me Claire Miller. They were all foreigners and spoke English. I was not good at English, but the miracle was that I understood everyone's messy words, roars, comfort, and pitiful whispers.

It was a strange and long dream. The injured place began to feel sharp and heavy pain. I lay back on the bed. The medical environment was better than before. The severe pain was not the kind of fatigue and weakness that was worn out by death. I became fresh and strong again.

It was an indescribable beautiful feeling, like my soul slowly merging with a body full of vitality. The damage from the car accident stimulated my confused nerve perception, and I truly felt the pain of being alive, so clearly that I could not resist escaping.

This pain came from broken bones, wailing internal organs, and mental reorganization.

With the comfort and gossip coming and going, I knew that I had become a six-year-old American girl, which frightened me for a few days, worrying that I was mentally ill and playing with myself. I slowly accepted the status quo and learned that the father of this little girl was a state policeman in Washington. He was involved in a jewelry robbery while patrolling on the highway and was shot three times by the criminals and died on the spot.

The mother was the woman I saw when I woke up. I heard that after the police notified her, she was overstimulated and took her six-year-old daughter into the car, and stepped on the accelerator frantically to go to the hospital to see her husband, which led to the car accident.

Overnight, this once perfect family of three was shattered.

Only I was left, and I survived again as an orphan.

During that time, many people in police uniforms came to the hospital to take care of me. They tried very hard to smile at me, tell me stories and jokes, and bring me many toys and plush dolls that children like, and skirts and new shoes that girls like.

I stared at them blankly, like a piece of wood, because my English was really bad. Even if it was strange that I could understand these foreign languages ​​mixed with various American slangs, popular humor, and various complex words without a teacher as soon as I woke up, I couldn't be sure whether it was this language when I opened my mouth. I was more inclined to think that I might speak Mandarin, Chinese.

So they thought I was scared and aphasic. Even the child psychologist came to build blocks for me every day and sang lullabies to me in a soft voice.

Later, a man appeared hurriedly. He was covered in dust and seemed to have just got off the plane. His luggage was thrown by the door of the ward. He was a typical American, with deep eye sockets, thin face, and tired face under his short dark brown hair. His behavior lacked the kind of enthusiasm and naturalness that people in this place have, but was a bit clumsy and rigorous. He seemed a little at a loss in front of me, "I'm your uncle, I just know about your mother's affairs, I'm really... damn it, I left you here alone for so long, forgive uncle, Claire, don't be sad."

The man who said he was my uncle reached out and hugged me carefully in his arms. He was afraid that he had frightened something fragile and said softly: "It's okay, it's all over, child, I will take care of you. Your parents will definitely not want you to be like this, you are a good child, you will be fine, Claire."

I felt that the temperature of this embrace was very warm, the same temperature as the embrace of the mother who protected Claire. I don't know why I actually opened my mouth and whispered: "Uncle?" With a little uncertainty, it was English, I think I should have pronounced the word correctly.

The man's arms trembled as he hugged me, and then he hugged me more tightly, and then his body shook violently. He choked and said: "It's uncle, your mother loves you very much, Claire, she really loves you."

I know that all mothers love their children the most.

But for a brother, losing his beloved sister is also a heart-wrenching pain.

Separation from life and death is always the biggest thing that humans cannot see through and cannot let go of.

I reached out and hugged him back, with a sharp and tender voice that I was not used to, "She loves you too."

I stayed in the hospital for half a month, and my uncle Charlie took care of me in the hospital. I am grateful to him. I am not the real Claire. I take others' kindness to me as a favor and remember it.

After I got better, he took me to the small town of Forks in Washington State, where he lived for half his life. It was raining in Forks on the day I came. When I passed the temperate forest, I saw that the trees and stones soaked in rain were covered with a thick layer of dark green. The endless mountains and trees are long and illusory like a dream.

The Quileute River rushes through the ancient forest filled with emerald green fog, as if singing all the way.

This is a green planet soaked in rainwater. I didn't expect that I would live here for many years.

Even before that family arrived here, I had never thought of this familiar-sounding place as being any different from any other place name in the world.