Sweet Romance13 min read
The Thousand-Year Door and the Blue Jacaranda
ButterPicks12 views
I keep thinking the first time I saw his face in my bathroom was a prank that would stop when I blinked. It didn't stop. It became my life.
"You're not going to believe this," Joanne Gonzalez said the first morning my picture went viral. Her voice came through the phone, breathless and excited. "Ariel, someone's uploaded the museum's portrait. You have to see it."
I laughed until I stopped. "A portrait? Come on, Jo. I look like everyone else."
"You look exactly like her," she insisted. "Exactly. People are losing it."
"Great. I always wanted to be part of a meme."
"Meet me tonight," she said. "I'll come over. Share the chaos."
That afternoon strangers started calling. My phone wouldn't stop buzzing. Messages: "Is that you?" "Are you related to the excavation?" "You must be reincarnated!"
By the time I left work, the city sky had gone purple and the bus carried only three people. The news loop on the roof TV said the tomb was a thousand years old, likely Northern Song. Experts showed a reconstructed portrait of the woman they thought lay inside. Her features were soft and clear. When they slid the image to a close-up of the eyes, my chest tightened.
"I don't believe it," I told myself, clutching my coffee. "It's a mirror—photoshop—luck."
That night I walked home beneath the trees. Lights played over the pavement. Fifteen meters ahead there was a figure in a moon-white robe. He stood so still the night folded around him.
"Hello?" a man and woman passed, laughing. The sound spilled over the alley and the figure was gone, as if swallowed by the air. I told myself I had only been skittish. I told myself the world made tricks when it was tired.
At home, the place I knew better than any map, I felt watched. I spilled flour on purpose in the kitchen, watched the dust settle, and then a line of small prints started across the floor—faint, then gone. The hairs on my arms prickled like small electric shocks.
I locked myself in the bathroom like a frightened animal. The white tiles were cold under my palms. My phone rang; it was Joanne.
"Ariel? Are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine," I lied and tossed the phone across the floor. It hit the sink and skidded. For a minute I sat with my forehead to the tile and tried to breathe.
Then a voice said my nickname, a sound like water on glass. "Ariel?" Not Joanne's voice, but a voice that slid into a place in my chest where a forgotten chord lived. I turned. A hand pulled back a shower curtain.
"Fish—" he said softly. "You are my wife."
He wore the cut of another time. His robe bore embroidery that could have been moonlight trapped in silk. He reached out and opened the curtain like a king unwrapping a small treasure. His face was not cruel. It was patient.
"Who are you?" I asked, and if I sounded small I had every right.
"I have been looking for you for a thousand years," he said. "I will not stop."
That day I learned how little I can trust knowing.
"You saw him too?" I told Joanne the next morning.
"I thought you were joking," she said. "You mean the small-robed guy? People are saying the portrait shows a woman named Yu Xi—Fish Xi. They're calling her 'the lady of the blue tree.'"
"The blue tree."
"Blue jacaranda," she corrected. "The tomb's memoirs refer to it. People started calling her that."
A shrine of headlines grew. Pictures of me proliferated, tagged and shared with captions that made my face a costume. My boss called and politely said they would give me some days off. "Don't go out," she said. "Let this cool down."
I tried to let it. But then he was in the elevator with me, modern clothes like a man who borrowed time and forgot the map. He smiled like a secret.
"Are you on your way to an interview?" he asked.
"I—" I felt my face go hot. "Yes."
"May I come?" he suggested.
"No." I said it too sharply. The elevator lurched into darkness. His voice wrapped around me like a scarf.
"Fish Xi," he said. "Come home. Open the thousand-door."
I gripped the handrail as the lights came back. His words were a blade and a balm. I cried in his arms like a hurt child and he didn't let go because he thought I belonged to him.
"Do you believe me now?" he asked as the elevator hummed back into life.
"No," I said, some part of me honest after the panic. "I have my life."
"Come with me," he said. "Enter the door and remember."
I didn't. I stood at the gallery where relics from the excavation were displayed and felt the bow of a thousand years tighten across my chest. There was a fan in a glass case—white silk, embroidered with a butterfly—and the nickname I had never used, Fish Xi, stuck in my throat like a pebble.
People crowded the museum that week. Vendors sold cheap fans with the portrait printed on them. I bought one out of a nervous dare and sat under a plane tree, the silk warming in my hand.
Then I fell asleep. When I woke, I was not in the park but in a court of lanterns; music breathed across the water; people bowed and whispered. I had a fan, a hairpin, and a dress I did not own. A tall young lord walked across the lawns and the world folded exactly as a memory might if it had legs.
"Your fan," he said, handing it to me with an easy, private smile.
"I've never been here," I said.
"You have," he corrected. "Three times."
I woke up on a park bench, the fan in my hand and the taste of jasmine in my mouth. It was too vivid to be a mere dream. Kenneth Nelson—his name was Kenneth—had the confidence of someone who remembered every page of a book he loved.
He came and went like weather. He would appear while I showered, polite and absurd. He praised small things I did. He ruffled my hair and took a purple-blossomed leaf from a tree and left it on my table.
"Why me?" I asked him once, standing in the doorway of his quiet attentions.
"Because you are beautiful," he said. "Because your past is tied to mine. Because I loved you."
I had interviews to attend. I had a life of emails and lunch boxes and rent. But sometimes a man would appear at the corner of my world and steady my step without asking.
"You're being obsessive," I told him once, more than teasing. "You're a thousand years old. Find someone else."
"I waited a thousand years," he said. "Do you think I can wait a few more?"
I did not know if he was human, ghost, or both. I only knew he smelled like rain on stone and he kept appearing when I wanted to be alone. Sometimes, when I fell asleep in the city, I dreamed of a blue jacaranda and a tree that flowered three times.
Not everyone adored him. The internet—always waiting for a headline—found a face to punish. When the research team dug deeper, they pulled a thread that led to another tomb. The husband, the lord once called the Marquis of Zeng, had his own grave. Side by side, a stone said, lay the lord and the princess Ling Yue. A forged inscription suggested a happy end: the princess chose to be buried beside him. The gossip mill exploded; the small lord became "a cad," "a turncoat." People wanted to make the story clean.
"You're reading the comments?" Kenneth asked once, smiling with an absurd gentleness.
"I have to know," I said.
"You don't," he replied. "It doesn't matter what they say."
But it did matter. The more his old name was dragged through mud, the more I wanted to know the truth. One night, after another argument about whether I was "his" or not, I went to the museum alone. I stood under the portrait and let the silence wash me.
"Fish Xi," someone hissed.
I turned. A woman walked the corridor like a stage. Her hair was half a crown of suffering and half a mask. She wore a borrowed sorrow and the voice that echoed my own. It was Kaleigh Greene—my childhood friend now turned a stranger—standing too close, eyes glittering.
"You never left," she said. Her words were syrup and glass.
"Kaleigh?" I said. "Are you... what are you doing here?"
"Remember me," she said. "Remember when you kept everything and left me nothing."
I had known Kaleigh since childhood. She grew up in the house that took me in. For years she had made the rules of small courtesies. I had always tried to be careful. But tonight something about her posture made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
"I didn't—you didn't—"
"Everything you loved was mine by right," she said. "You stole it and kept it. Now I want it back."
She stepped closer. People near the gallery had stopped to look. She lifted her hand and smoke curled like a bad smell. Her fingers were blackened and the wall behind us seemed to shiver.
"Kaleigh," I said, low. I felt cold breath on my neck as if some other mouth had come near. "Stop."
She laughed. The sound hit the glass case and trembled. A tourist raised a phone. "Hey, did you see that?" someone said. "Is that the woman from the portrait?"
Kaleigh's face went through moods like a weather station. At first triumph—"I have you"—then denial—"No, I didn't!"—then fury—"You took him!"—then collapse like a wave when she realized people watched.
Security rushed in. A small crowd had gathered, bracelet cameras and tourist phones focused on us. I stood in the middle of a stage of lights and judgment as she screamed accusations I had never heard before.
"She took the throne," Kaleigh spat. "She took him and pretended to be kind. She killed me!"
"Miss, please calm down," a guard said. His voice was clipped and practiced.
"You are defaming her," a woman said, pushing her camera forward. "She's a hero!"
"She's lying," Kaleigh cried. Tears, not genuine, streamed down half her face. She grabbed at her chest and collapsed to her knees, fingers clawing at air. "You wiped me out! You let them bury me and changed the stone! You!" She jabbed a finger at me as if it were a dagger.
People murmured. Some stepped forward; others moved back. Someone from the museum pressed a button. "Staff, please assist," they said into a radio.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked. My voice was small in the echoing hall.
"Because you have what I lost," she said. Her voice cracked into grief that became rage. "Because you smiled where I should have been seen. Because you didn't let me be enough."
A journalist shoved a microphone into her face. "Miss Greene, what do you hope to achieve?"
Kaleigh turned to the camera, all performance. "I want the truth!" she cried. "I want everyone to know she's a thief of souls!"
She lunged and the security team moved. One guard caught her arm; she snapped at him and blood sprang where her fingernail tore skin. The guard's face changed to a darker red.
"She's dangerous," someone said. "Call an ambulance."
The cameras kept rolling. Kenneth was not there, but the room felt like a clock wound tight. The crowd's faces were mirrors reflecting versions of what they wanted to see. Some wanted a villain; some wanted a martyr. I wanted to vanish.
Kaleigh's expression shifted as easily as a film cuts. She went from rage to pleading to disbelief. First she yelled, "She ruined me! She took everything!" Then, when a young woman stepped forward and filmed Kaleigh's hands blackened and smoking, someone shouted, "Is this some act? You're hurting people."
"No—no!" Kaleigh said. She tried to snatch her hands away. "You don't understand. It was her all along! She loved him—"
"Stop!" a voice said. Kenneth stepped into the hall like someone who had walked out of a painting. He walked slow, with the certainty of someone who had measured grief and found it wanting.
"Kenneth," I breathed, for he was both what he had been and the impossible visitor who appeared in my bathroom.
He did not touch Kaleigh at first. He looked at her like you look at something broken you once loved. The crowd tightened. The cameras zoomed in. Live feeds pinged across social networks: "Museum drama: woman storms exhibit" trended within minutes.
"Kaleigh," Kenneth said softly. "Tell them."
"I will tell them," she snapped. "She poisoned me! She took him and left me to rot!"
Her voice climbed into hunger. People smelled the tale—betrayal sells. Satisfied, the crowd leaned in as if they wanted to hear the end of the song. Kenneth's face hardened, not cruel but resolved.
"Tell me the truth," he said. "Not the lie your anger stitches."
She laughed. "You don't get to—"
He stepped closer. His hand came out like a slow sun. He removed something small from his sleeve—a thin braid of hair tied with faded ribbon. The museum's lights glinted on it.
"Kenneth, what are you—" A security guard was two steps away.
"This hair belonged to her once," Kenneth said. His voice carried. "I kept it because memory is a stubborn thing. We misread the stones and miswrote the names because the world wanted a tidy story. But the truth does not disappear because it is written over."
Kaleigh's face changed. First imitation of composure, then confusion, then—tiny fissures of fear. The audience shifted. People had already taken sides; now many of them looked uncertain.
"She confessed," a woman whispered. "We have evidence."
"Confessed to what?" Kaleigh demanded, but now her tone had hollowed. The crowd's hum turned into a chorus of cameras and cell phones.
Kenneth placed the braid on the glass between us and the portrait. "She was not a thief. She defended herself," he said. "Those who erased the truth were afraid of what would happen if the world remembered. They wrote lies because they could not bear the shame."
A few murmurs turned into shouts. "Let her explain!" a man called.
Kaleigh went from a figure of scorn to someone cornered. Her earlier strategy—blame the one who looked like the face—was unraveling. The more she tried to rant, the more her words sounded like rehearsed lines from a play.
"You're lying," she hissed. "You always were. You kept him—"
"Aren't you tired of pretending?" Kenneth asked. He was steady. "Do it in front of those who saw. Tell them what you did. Tell them who you were when the world had time to look away."
For a moment Kaleigh's chest heaved. The crowd pushed closer like the sea's young wave. Her face moved through shades: triumph, denial, terror, pleading.
"No!" she cried. "No, it wasn't like that—"
"Then tell us," Kenneth said. "Say it."
She opened her mouth, and in a voice that broke, she said, "She took him. I— I used poison. I wanted him to be mine. I did not expect the death."
The sound she made when she admitted it was not the sound of confession but of a dam breaking.
There were gasps. People recorded. Someone whispered, "She killed someone?" The security guard held his radio like a talisman.
Kaleigh's shoulders trembled. She went from fierce to frantic. "No—no— I'm not—" She lashed out, accusation filling her mouth, "I tried to make him love me—"
At first there was anger. Then the crowd turned to the museum staff. "Call the police," they demanded. Phones were out. A nearby docent dialed numbers with shaking fingers.
Kaleigh's bravado drained. Her mask of rage crumbled into tears. "Please," she begged Kenneth suddenly, as if remembering something holy. "Forgive me."
Kenneth's face was a quiet map of pain. "You cannot unmake the dead," he said, and the words were not harsh, only true.
She went through the stages the rulebook of disgrace prescribes. At first she yelled and pointed, trying to convict me with projection. When evidence—a small relic, the braid, a newly read fragment—was laid out, her face flushed with denial. "No, it didn't happen that way," she hissed. When the cameras waited and witnesses recounted small things—alarms, missing servants—her voice rose into panic, "I didn't mean—" And then, finally, as the guards guided her away, she collapsed with a sob that shook her whole body. She pleaded to anyone who would listen, "I was lonely. I was betrayed. You don't know."
The crowd did not pity her. The reactions were three-fold: some recorded, some whispered their shock, some stood with arms folded, relieved. A young woman cried and said, "I can't believe it. She always seemed jealous." Others shouted, "Shame!" and a few slapped the pavement with their hands like a judge's gavel.
She was led from the hall with a handful of onlookers trailing, pushing her past exhibits, past people who had once smiled at me like an old picture. People took photos. Some cheered. A child asked, "Is it over?" An older man called, "Justice." Another woman whispered, "I always hoped the truth would come."
When the police took her statement that evening, the live stream had already looped into millions of views. Kenneth watched from the hall's edge, his expression as spare as bone. He did not gloat. He looked weary and relieved.
Later, in the cool quiet after the storm, he found me at the portrait. He did not touch me. He just stood there, a grieving sentinel.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I think so," I said. "She almost got me. She followed me on the subway. She stole my bracelet."
"I saw," Kenneth said. "She had help. She was worn thin by a hate that found its shape in you."
"I never wanted this," I said, voice small. "I just wanted my life."
"You are not a life to be taken or a portrait to be sold," he said. "You are a person. If you want away from all this, I will respect it."
We walked out into the dusk. The fan I had bought lay folded in my bag, a small relic of a life that had folded two times over. The blue jacaranda outside the museum let one purple petal fall onto the pavement like a soft punctuation.
Weeks later the museum would release the corrected translation. Stones once plain had been found to be refaced. Names replaced. History adjusted. Kaleigh Greene was arraigned for causing harm in ways both direct and shrouded. The public punishment—her stripping of the false narrative in front of cameras and scholars—would be analyzed and debated for months.
She had been a living rival who became a monster of grief and wings. The punishment had been public and long. She had started as defiant, then denied, then collapsed, then begged, then finally was read out of the room by official voices. She had watched as the crowd's mood changed from appetite to condemnation. She had realized the world watched and that the world had recorded every breakdown to play back in a thousand hours of clip.
In private the small lord and I talked. He told me how the marble had been cast over, how names had been changed to make them comfortable. He placed his palm over the portrait's frame as if to comfort a ghost. "I was a fool," he said. "I believed what I wanted because it hurt less than the truth."
"Do you hate them for it?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I hate what fear can do. I hate my own blindness."
We would cross paths often after that. Once, under the jacaranda's smoky light, he plucked a petal and slid it into my palm.
"If you ever want to know everything," he said, "open the door."
"I do not want to forget my life," I told him. "I like my apartment, my work, the way Joanne laughs at terrible jokes. I like small things."
"I can make you remember," he said. "I can take you through the thousand doors. You might lose yourself to the past or find yourself. You decide."
I kept my fan in a drawer. I kept the hairband he had shown everyone in a small box. I kept the braid, too, wrapped in tissue under my socks. The world had shown me it could hold both cruelty and pardon in the same breath.
Days passed. The museum closed for a week for an audit. Kaleigh's trial began in the winter. Newspapers printed reconstructed timelines and family names. Some people argued she had been wronged by life. Others said she had destroyed a life.
"No more doors unless you ask," Kenneth said once, when I hesitated on his threshold.
"I don't think I'm ready to open anything," I told him. "But I am not afraid of you."
He smiled like a man who had waited a long time for an answer he already knew. "That's enough for now."
Months later I returned to the gallery for a small event—an exhibit about the preservation of truth. The portrait hung, steady and calm. I walked past it and paused. A child looked up at the painting and asked his mother, "Is she a queen?"
"She was a woman," his mother said. "Now she's a teacher to us all."
Outside, the jacaranda leaned low like an old friend. A purple petal landed on my fan which I had opened, pocketing it like a memory.
I touched the silk and thought of trees that bloom three times and of a thousand doors that sometimes open and sometimes stay closed. I thought of being led by a man who loved me across centuries and of a woman who lost herself in the ache to possess.
"Will you come?" Kenneth asked, as if he had stepped out of a picture just to ask.
I looked at my hands. I felt nothing like the person who had been shoved into a river or the girl who had lied to keep peace. I felt myself as someone who had kept breathing through everything.
"Not yet," I said. "Not yet, Kenneth."
He bowed the smallest of bows, a gentleman from a time that still had space for old courtesies, and walked away under the jacaranda. One of the purple flowers fell and landed on the fan.
I closed the fan gently.
The End
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