About Xirayu

Time slowly settled through the air, like a layer of dusty light touched again and again, covering the past that had not yet cooled.

Those fragments of old days hovered in the depths of memory, like star shadows beneath the surface of water, swaying gently yet refusing to go out.

When the wind swept past, it carried away clear outlines and left only touch and lingering warmth, echoing again and again in the blankness. Once-bright instants were folded into soft creases and hidden in the dark pocket of years, occasionally letting out a faint glow in the silence, reminding me that they had not truly gone.

Dusk is always the most fitting moment for remembrance. Light becomes hesitant, shadows are stretched long, and even meaning itself begins to blur. Unfinished emotions are like a stalled tide, testing the edge of the heart’s lake again and again, yet never overflowing, leaving only a low echo behind.

When night covers all things, memory instead becomes clearer. It is like frost falling on old traces, cold and transparent, impossible to ignore. Remembrance is not a return, but a kind of still placement: letting what has passed slowly appear within time, and in undisturbed darkness, regain its original shape.

When every sound sinks into the depths and only a breathlike rhythm remains, the past is set down in a gentle way. At the end of silence, remembrance turns into a faint and lasting light, illuminating the final instant before forgetting.

If IGCrystal faces the future, then Xirayu stands within memory.

Everything in the past was once so beautiful.

Yellowed photographs hang quietly on the wall, yet thoughts surge in like a tide, striking every nerve in the mind. The warmth of my mother’s arms seems still to remain; the first unsteady steps gradually became firm. The time spent with family, day after day, quietly laid itself into a warm road.

Do you still remember that time camping on the mountain with friends? The campfire swayed, illuminating not only the night, but the clumsy yet sincere friendship between us. Standing beside broad rivers and looking toward the distant opposite bank, laughter from catching fish and shrimp mingled with the sound of water. The excitement of crossing the river by steamboat for the first time still trembles softly somewhere deep in the chest.

But none of it can be returned to.

The past did not abandon me suddenly. It simply stepped back without a sound, leaving me no time to say goodbye. Those beautiful memories gradually faded in time. I reached out to catch them, but caught only blankness. Whenever I think of this, sorrow rises like a tide, almost leaving me unable to breathe.

If only it could happen one more time.

Even if only to walk that old road once more, stand once more beside that river, and feel once more the present I did not know was precious.

But time has no echo.

It leaves only memory, letting people learn slowly, through loss, how to cherish.

I stood before those photographs for a long time without moving.

Fine ripples had risen in the photo paper, and the corners curled slightly, as if resisting time’s final erosion. I know they will one day fade completely, like many faces I can no longer clearly remember. But in this moment, they still stubbornly exist.

They exist in the place where I have not yet let go.

Memory sometimes does not appear as images.

More often, it is a feeling: a chest suddenly tightening, a pause with no reason, an ache rising in the deepest quiet of night. I do not deliberately look back. It is only that, when the world slows down, the past walks out on its own.

I once thought that remembrance was painful because of loss.

Only later did I understand that what is truly unbearable is “the happiness I did not realize at the time.”

It was too light.

So light that it had no weight while I possessed it, yet after it was lost, it could no longer be borne.

The night grew deep.

Outside the window, wind moved the shadows of trees, making a sound almost like breathing. I closed my eyes and let those images sink one by one into the dark. They were no longer sharp and no longer forced me to return to the past. They simply stayed there quietly, like a marked river, reminding me that I had once walked through.

Perhaps the reason Xirayu stands within memory is not that she is unwilling to move forward.

It is because someone must remember, for those moments that have gone far away, that they were once so real.

At last, I turned and left that wall.

Not as farewell.

But to carry them away gently.

Time will not turn back, but I can.

Not to return to the past, but to keep moving forward with it.