Excerpt:

“Why did you come?”

“Because you’re going to die in a year.”

“Do you know why I come here? It’s because when I come here, and I see these people, I feel at peace. These people have nothing to do with me dying. It’s better than being in my room obsessing over what I can’t change. When I heard from the doctor that I’m going to die, I thought that all the things I’ve built up until now are very shallow. And I realized that I’m lonely. I don’t want to be alone, separated from people, but whomever I’m with, it’ll be hard on them when the end approaches. What should I do? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be alone.”

I don’t want to be alone. He understood those feelings: being alone, scared, feeling hopeless, and despair. He had experienced them, lived them, and he couldn’t deny their torturous existence in another.

“Raise your head and look at me Sehun,” Zitao said, as he reached a hand out to the younger man, crouched down and crying on the pavement. “I will always be by your side. Until you die, you won’t be alone.”

Zitao pulled him up and into a hug. As Sehun buried his face in his neck, a new resolve settled into him. For 365 days, he will try to stay with Sehun. They will live every day, enough for a lifetime’s worth of memories.